By online marketing we can understand all activities related to the sale of products and services that we carry out on the Internet. If a company wants to be successful today, it has to focus on online marketing in most cases. We will take a look at some tips on how to become successful in the world of online marketing so that your business will progress over time.
In order to get started, we need to describe in more detail what online marketing is. It is actually a large part of marketing that focuses on the visibility of one’s business on the internet. Perhaps the biggest part of online marketing is social media. These include, for example, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. These are the three most visited social networks in Slovakia, visited by millions of people per month.
In general, almost 5 million Slovaks are online. Almost 3 million actively use social media. There has been a 6.6% increase in the number of social media users between 2019 and 2020. According to Statista data from July 2020, Facebook is the most widely used social network in Slovakia, with 2.7 million people accessing it per month, which is approximately half of the population in Slovakia. The second place is taken by YouTube, where 2.4 million Slovaks come monthly. More than one million users from Slovakia are on Instagram, where 1.2 million Slovaks come monthly.
Up to 96% of Slovak users use social media via mobile. The share of web traffic generated by mobile phones is increasing, while that of laptops and computers is decreasing.
Facebook – a phenomenon of our time
There are very few people in the world who don’t know Facebook. That’s why it is extremely important to set up a business account on this social network, because you can get several hundred new clients there. In this article, we will look at some tips and advice on how to be successful on Facebook.
First and foremost, you need to have creative communication for your brand. You should follow the motto of less is sometimes more in your company, you should not tell people everything at once and all at once. Entertain people on your page with different puns, communicate the same content in different ways and what is extremely important – be unique. Show people what separates you from the competition and create different innovations that no one has had before. Be the one your competitors will buy from.
If you want to build a successful brand for your business, you need to have engaging content on your Facebook page. Your content needs to be authentic, regular and 80% useful and 20% marketable. We’ll explain what that means in the following lines.
If you want to attract as many people as possible to your Facebook page, you need something to engage them. To start with, choose three headings that you want people to be interested in. Let’s take this as an example: if you own a restaurant downtown, post various facts about food or social events. For the next, attract customers with the history of the town or restaurant in which the gastro business is located.
Interaction with the audience is also very important. For example, take a picture of a dish you’ve cooked in your restaurant in the last few days, take a picture of it and ask the audience what it is. This is how you keep in touch with people and their subconscious is whispering to them that you are good at communicating and that’s why they like to visit you. The last 20% is already sales itself, when you use a slogan that speaks about your quality.
How to make a good Facebook business profile?
To begin with, it is important to understand the difference between a personal profile and a business profile on Facebook. Personal profiles are set up by individuals who want to find out about world news or keep in touch with friends. It is these personal profiles that are the target of corporate profiles set up by companies, celebrities or various organisations. Corporate profiles include, for example, media portals or personal profiles. The advantage of a company profile is the possibility to promote your own brand through paid advertising or tracking a number of statistics.
Unfortunately, many companies are not making the most of their Facebook profiles. Neil Patel has written down some tips on how to manage a good and thriving company profile. The basics are to insert a profile and cover photo. The profile photo can be your logo, for example. The cover photo can feature company employees or various slogans.
Another important part is the about you section. This is perhaps the most important part that many companies neglect. This is where people should find out basic information about the company, such as what you do for a living.
If you want to be successful on Facebook, be sure to keep an eye on your stats. These show you what you need to improve on, what posts have been the most or least successful, and you can go from there. You can find a lot of very useful things in stats. For example, the arrivals of the like tags are worth mentioning. Facebook can evaluate whether people liked your page from your timeline or searched for you by themselves.
Facebook Ads
If you’ve been struggling with low organic follower numbers for a long time and you can’t manage your page so that they come to your page on their own, you need to pay for advertising. One of the other reasons to choose Facebook advertising is its traffic. It’s the most well-known and most visited social network in the world, with more than 2.5 billion people coming to it every month.
Another reason to choose Facebook advertising for your business is that people also spend a lot of time on this social network on a daily basis. People around the world
Since Facebook asks for your location data, this has helped sites that frequently use paid advertising on Facebook. If they only want to offer their services to one city, they tick a specific city when they set up their ad for people to see it in.
Content strategy
According to the Association of Digital Marketing Agencies (ADMA), it’s best if you don’t contribute too often or too little to your page. If you have a media portal and you’re on Facebook, posts could easily be contributed every one hour, even more frequently for hot news stories. However, if you’re building your own brand on Facebook, one post every few days, for example, is enough. The key is regularity and value. Communication is the foundation of any brand’s success, and look for topics that interest, entertain or anger your fans.
Types of organic promotion on Facebook
There are many ways to promote and increase your brand’s visibility on the California social network. As mentioned, you can increase your visibility organically, but you can also do it through paid advertising. Organically, you can increase your visibility by posting interesting content for your followers, who may in turn share it with their friends, who will also start following you. This is what business profiles depend on personal profiles for, because it helps them become more visible.
Contributions
When it comes to posts, there are different types that you can publish on your page. Either you post a photo with a description that describes the content. You can also post an engaging video instead of a photo. A short description that describes the video fits with it as well. Also new to Facebook are 3D photos, which allow you to create a panorama-style photo. You can move around in 3D photos by moving your thumb or flipping your phone.
Stories
Another useful way to get people talking about you and perceiving you is to post stories. These, colloquially, stories serve to keep you from having to clutter up your timeline with lots of photos. You add stories to your page simply: on your page profile photo there is such a plus in a little blue box. When you click on it, you choose the options to create a story, view your profile photo, and select a new profile photo just the first option. It automatically takes you to your photo gallery where you can select from the photo you’ve already created, or upload a new photo directly into the system. If you don’t want to insert any text, sticker or song, you just put the story to share and your story will be published.
Instagram – a progressive platform
Another social network that we will introduce in this article is the platform that belongs to Facebook, Instagram. Again, communication with the audience is also important here. Instagram is primarily for posting photos and videos, not extensive text. In recent years, the popularity of this social network has grown rapidly, and many people consider it to be the primary social network. However, for businesses, Instagram should be a sub-service of Facebook on which they should primarily present themselves.
To be successful on Instagram, you need to have much more regular and lively content than on Facebook. If you want to communicate properly on Instagram, you should use a lot of hashtags. Hashtags serve as an unpaid advertisement for your product. If your clothing store received new Adidas merchandise, tag the hashtag below the photo “Today our new #Adidas sweatpants arrived in the store.” If you enter this hashtag, anyone from around the world will be able to see your sweatpants if they click on #Adidas on any other profile.
Instagram’s place in digital strategy
According to a study by the Association of Digital Marketing Agencies (ADMA), Instagram’s place in digital strategy is very important and irreplaceable. Its content is divided into three parts: Storytelling, Inspiration and Motivation.
Storytelling is about telling a story with breathtaking photographs that captivate your customers. Under the word storytelling, we can also see videos that immerse you in the action.
You don’t go on Instagram to discuss political events in the country. People go there to relax, have fun and find inspiration, for example, when cooking a meal where a chef posts a video of his recipe. You can also find there various beauties of the world where you probably don’t have an easy way to get to.
People often go to Instagram to find motivation as well. Can’t get over the urge to go for a run, but you need to and don’t want to? Go on Instagram and find people who pick up their sports shoes and go for a run at sunset or sunrise. Trust that you will get overwhelmed and the results will show right away.
Advertising in search
Google offers a number of ways to make your business more visible in the browser. One of them is search advertising. This is a text-based form of advertising that can be precisely targeted to your potential customer. For example, if you’re in the interior doors business, pay for a Google search ad and a customer who types “interior doors” into a search will see your business on the first few pages thanks to the ad you paid for.
You can target this advertising based on keywords or landing pages. Let’s stay with those interior doors. When you set up your ad, you’ll enter the keywords “interior” and “doors”. As for landing pages, Google Ads will bid your landing pages when you set up your ad. By providing this list, you determine when to show your dynamic ad and where Google Ads should direct potential customers on your page.
Video advertising
Video advertising is a very popular type of business promotion nowadays. People often search for videos to familiarize themselves with a company. It is an easier way than reading some comprehensive article. You can summarise what you would like to offer a customer in a one A4 article in a one minute video. This is also why this type of advertising is coming to the fore, and can be used on YouTube or Facebook.
Video advertising on YouTube
Video advertising on YouTube takes many forms. The basic ones are divided into skippable in-stream ads and non-skippable in-stream ads. Skip-able ads are those that you can skip after five seconds before or during the video. Google support recommends using these ads if your main campaign goals include sales, leads, website traffic, brand awareness and reach, or product and brand purchase consideration.
The unskippable in-stream ads are the ones you have to watch to the end. These video ads are shorter than 15 seconds and play before or during other videos anyway. These ads are meant to increase brand awareness and reach, and viewers can’t skip them.
Video advertising on Facebook
Video advertising on Facebook is 135% more effective than static reach. Also, this type of advertising has a greater impact on the purchase of your product or service than if you had chosen, for example, a carousel ad. It’s all down to the fact that people often seek out videos if they want to learn about something new. They’re actually lazier to read an article than to watch a shorter video.
You can create up to a 2-hour video on Facebook. Here’s a question for you: could you watch one video on Facebook for that long? Most people would give up right away, or skip it outright. That’s why it’s most important that you make your video as short as possible with engaging content. The ideal video length is around 30 seconds, during which you should summarize everything essential that a customer should know. More than 80% of people watch ads without audio. That’s why it’s important that you also create a video without sound with short subtitles so that it engages as many people as possible.
SEO articles
SEO articles are important for increasing company awareness. For example, if you are a marketing agency, you can start your own blog to publish SEO articles that, when well written, will get your article to the top of Google searches.
The key to a successful SEO article is unique content and frequent use of the keywords you specify before writing the article. It’s also important to use as many links in the article as possible to other sites where you’ve drawn information from. These articles are lengthy and few people read them all the way through. Therefore, choose an engaging introduction that everyone can get through.
When you have finished the article, read it over and check for any grammatical errors. After checking and publishing, ask yourself a basic question: Is your content better than your competitors’? If it is, you’ll get to the top of the search rankings and you can be happy with your work.
Advertising on news websites
Another type of online marketing is advertising on news websites. Such advertising is divided into two parts: banner advertising or PR articles.
You can get your banner ad on news portals in different ways: either Google will automatically push you there when you’ve paid for an ad via Google Ads, or by agreement with the news portal administrator. Most of the time, these are portals that have high viewership numbers and people like to come back to their site.
If you want to advertise on a news site in the form of a PR article, you must contact the webmaster directly. You will send the finished article with photos to the editorial office, which the portal will publish on its website. Most of the time, comments are turned off on these articles so that people cannot discuss in the comments.
Advertising in online catalogues
Online catalogues are also a way to make your business more visible. It is a very simple way to present basic company information in a few lines. The most famous online catalogues of companies in Slovakia include Azet and Zlaté stránky.
The company should have a few sentences about itself, basic contact details (phone number, email, email address, website), company headquarters, billing details or opening hours in the online catalogue. Also, if the company has a social media account, there is an option to automatically link to their Facebook or Instagram.
In conclusion, online advertising is an excellent tool for effectively reaching new potential customers. In this day and age, there is no business that can say to itself that it doesn’t need to communicate online. The world is becoming more and more virtual and it is up to each of you to keep up with the times or miss the last train.
