Touch Cleveland - Resources #Digital marketing

A Step-by-Step Social Media Strategy for Small Businesses

Tue, 15 Aug 2023 14:58:00 -0400

In today's digital era, having a strong social media strategy is no longer an option but a necessity for small businesses to thrive in the competitive landscape. In this blog post, we'll walk you through a step-by-step guide to help you unleash the power of social media and create a winning strategy that drives growth, engagement, and success.

1. Define Your Goals and Your Objectives:

Before diving into social media, it's crucial to define your social media goals and objectives. Are you looking to increase brand awareness, drive website traffic, boost sales, or improve customer engagement? Identifying your objectives will guide your strategy and ensure your efforts are aligned with your overall business goals and help you to track your progress along the way.

2. Research Your Target Audience:

To effectively connect with your audience, you must understand who they are, what they want, and where they spend their time online.Conduct thorough research to uncover their demographics, interests, pain points, and preferred social media platforms. Use this knowledge to select your platform and engagement strategies. From there, you can tailor your content and messaging to resonate with your audience.

3. Select the Right Social Media Platforms:

Not all social media platforms are created equal, and it's essential to choose the ones that align with your target audience and business objectives. Each platform has its own strengths and characteristics. Evaluate each platform's demographics, features, and engagement opportunities to make informed decisions about where to invest your time and resources.

4. Create Compelling and Relevant Content:

Content is the heart of any successful social media strategy and drives your social media success. Develop a content strategy that aligns with your brand identity and resonates with your audience. Craft compelling and relevant content that educates, entertains, or inspires your followers. Use a mix of formats such as images, videos, infographics, and blog posts to keep your content fresh and engaging while maintaining a consistent brand voice.

5. Plan and Schedule Your Content:

Consistency is key in social media marketing. Create a content calendar that outlines your posting schedule, topics, and key events. Use social media management tools to schedule your posts in advance, ensuring a consistent presence and freeing up time for other important tasks.

6. Consistent Branding:

Maintain a consistent brand identity across all your social media platforms. Use cohesive visuals, colors, and tone of voice to create a recognizable and memorable brand presence. Consistency builds trust and helps establish your brand as a reliable source of information and a go-to authority in your industry.

7. Engage and Interact with Your Audience:

Social media is a two-way street. Engage with your audience by responding to comments, messages, and mentions promptly. Encourage conversations, ask questions, and actively participate in relevant industry discussions. Building genuine connections with your audience fosters loyalty and brand advocacy.

8. Track and Analyze Your Performance:

Regularly monitor your social media performance using analytics tools. Track metrics such as reach, engagement, follower growth, and conversion rates. Analyze the data to identify what's working and what's not. Use this information to refine your strategy, make data-driven decisions, and optimize your social media efforts.

9. Stay Updated and Adapt:

Social media platforms and trends evolve rapidly. Stay updated with the latest features, algorithm changes, and industry best practices. Continuously learn, experiment, and adapt your strategy to stay ahead of the curve and maintain a competitive edge.

A well-executed social media strategy can be a game-changer for small businesses. By setting clear objectives, understanding your audience, choosing the right platforms, crafting compelling content, and fostering engagement, you can create a powerful social media presence. Regularly analyze your performance, adapt to changes, and never stop learning. Remember, social media is not a one-size-fits-all approach, so experiment, learn, and adapt to find the strategies that work best for your business.

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Unleashing the Power of Marketing Visuals: Captivate, Connect, Convert

Tue, 01 Aug 2023 14:58:28 -0400

Visuals come in a wide variety of formats, each with its unique advantages and use cases. From product photos to social media graphics, visual content plays a critical role in capturing attention, building brand recognition, and driving engagement and sales.

In this blog, we will explore the immense value of marketing visuals and how you can incorporate visuals into your marketing strategy.

Here are some of the key benefits of marketing visuals:

Visuals capture attention: In a world where we are constantly bombarded with information, capturing your audience’s attention is no easy feat. Marketing visuals act as the ultimate attention-grabbers. Humans are naturally drawn to visual content, with studies suggesting that visuals are processed 60,000 times faster than text, making it a more effective way to communicate messages and capture the attention of your audience. By strategically employing eye-catching visuals, brands can cut through the noise and make an immediate impact, enticing viewers to explore further.
Visuals convey emotions: Visuals are a great way to convey emotions and feelings in a way that text alone cannot. Visuals have the unique ability to evoke emotions and create a multi-sensory experience, fostering deeper engagement with your audience. By using colors, images, and other visual elements, you can create an emotional connection with your audience and make your brand more relatable and memorable.
Visuals increase engagement: Engagement is the lifeblood of successful marketing campaigns. Visual content is more likely to be shared, liked, and commented on than text-based content. By incorporating visuals into your marketing strategy, you can increase engagement and reach a wider audience. Whether it's through interactive content, user-generated visuals, or immersive videos, leveraging visuals can significantly enhance audience participation, social sharing, and overall campaign success.
Visuals build brand recognition: Consistency is key to building brand recognition, and visuals play a vital role in establishing and reinforcing brand identity. Elements such as logos, colors, and typography form the visual DNA of a brand. By incorporating these elements consistently across marketing visuals, brands can create a strong and recognizable visual identity that helps them stand out in the crowded marketplace.
Visuals drive conversions: The goal of marketing is to drive conversions. Visuals play a critical role in this process by effectively communicating the value and benefits of your products or services. High-quality product images, informative videos, and visually appealing testimonials can instill trust and confidence in your audience, helping to guide them through the conversion journey.

So, how can you incorporate marketing visuals into your marketing strategy?

Here are some tips:

Use high-quality visuals: High-quality images are the backbone of visual marketing. Invest in professional photography or leverage stock photo platforms to curate a collection of images that represent your brand. The quality of your visuals can make a big difference in how they are perceived by your audience. Use these images across your website, social media channels, blog posts, and email campaigns to evoke emotions, tell stories, and create a visual experience that resonates with your audience.
Use visuals to tell a story: Visuals are a great way to tell a story and create an emotional connection with your audience. Storytelling lies at the heart of effective marketing, and visuals serve as powerful storytelling tools. They can convey emotions, trigger curiosity, and evoke responses from your audience. Whether through a series of captivating images or a thought-provoking video, visuals enable brands to communicate their narratives more engagingly and memorably, forging deeper connections with their audience. Use visuals to highlight the benefits of your product or service, showcase your brand's values, or tell the story of your brand's history.
Use visuals consistently: Consistency is key when using visuals in your marketing strategy. Use consistent colors, fonts, and imagery across all marketing channels to create a strong and recognizable brand identity.
Harness the Power of Infographics: Infographics are an excellent way to present complex information in a visually appealing and easily digestible format. Whether you include statistics, data, or step-by-step processes, infographics can transform dense content into visually engaging narratives. Utilize online design tools or collaborate with a graphic designer to create visually stunning infographics that inform, educate, and entertain your audience.
Create Captivating Video Content: Video content continues to dominate the digital landscape, making it an indispensable component of your marketing strategy. From short promotional videos, product demonstrations, or customer testimonials, leverage the power of videos to tell compelling stories and engage your audience on a deeper level. Consider utilizing platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and LinkedIn to share your video content and maximize its reach.

In conclusion, marketing visuals are a critical component of any successful marketing strategy. Visual marketing can captivate attention, tell compelling stories, build brand recognition, enhance engagement, and drive conversions. As you develop your marketing campaigns, make visuals a core component of your strategy, ensuring they align with your brand's identity and resonate with your target audience. Embrace the immense potential of marketing visuals, and watch as your brand captivates, connects, and converts like never before.

Remember, a picture is worth a thousand words, but the right marketing visual is worth a thousand conversions.

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Top Free Marketing Resources for Small Businesses

Fri, 12 May 2023 10:24:00 -0400

Marketing is an essential aspect of any business, but it often requires more time and money than small businesses have. There are many free marketing tools out there that you can use to help promote your business without breaking the bank and give back some of the time you spend on these efforts.

Here at Touch, we like to work smarter, not harder. The free marketing tools listed here are our recommendations that you can get started with today.

Social Media

First up are our recommended social media scheduling tools. When used correctly, social media is a powerful tool that small businesses can use to grow. When used strategically, social media outreach can build awareness, increase sales and build a customer base.

Often content is put out on social media to check off the box and does not yield results. Social media goals should align with the mission and goals of your business. Once you have a social media strategy, we suggest building out monthly content. With this plan, we recommend utilizing a social media scheduling tool to ensure that your content makes it to the intended platform and remains consistent throughout the month.

Our recommendations include Meta Business Suite and Buffer.

Meta Business Suite: the social media giant Meta, aka Facebook and Instagram, has made scheduling within the business suite seamless.

Publish feed posts and stories for both Facebook and Instagram at the same time
Schedule posts and stories
Save drafts and upload creative assets to the media library
Post performance and ad management

Buffer: this social media management tool allows you to schedule posts across multiple platforms.

Schedule up to ten posts across three social media platforms
Perfect option for small businesses who want to schedule content on platforms other than Facebook and IG
Option to upgrade to paid tiers for additional services

While there are other options on the market, we recommend these free tools for your social media scheduling.

Graphic Design

Branding is an essential aspect of your business. Competition for real estate on social media, inboxes, and ad space is steep. Compelling graphics, images, and videos is essential to grabbing and keeping the attention of your target audience. The number of free graphic design tools on the market continues to grow.

Canva: Our recommendation is Canva. Canva is a popular design tool that has a free and a premium version. Canva offers all the capabilities needed to build graphics for a successful marketing campaign.

Wide range of templates and design elements
Upload your images and customize them to fit your brand
User-friendly

Web Design

In addition to graphic design for your social media, email marketing, and ads, having a professional and eye-catching website is essential for success in today’s digital world.

Two free tools and website design services are Wix and WordPress.

Wix: With Wix, you can create a professional-looking website in minutes.

Easy-to-use drag-and-drop builder
Offers templates and customizations
Add-ons including photo galleries, social media icons, and contact forms

WordPress: WordPress is a free website builder and content management system.

Hundreds of website templates
Customization options
Integrates with social media platforms
Thousands of free plugins to enhance functionality

While we love both tools, we suggest Wix for beginners and most small businesses.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to communicate with your audience and drive conversions, to directly reach customers and provide updates on your latest products or services.

There are a ton of free email marketing tools available that can help you get started.

We want to share two of the top contenders, MailChimp vs. HubSpot.

Both of these email marketing tools offer solid free plans

Mailchimp is intuitively user-friendly
HubSpot has a steeper learning curve for new users
Both offer drag-and-drop templates
Mailchimp offers more with limited customization options
HubSpot offers fewer templates with more customization options

Our recommendation for most small businesses starting, Mailchimp is the perfect fit, it offers just enough to be successful without being overwhelming.

Free marketing tools are suited for most small businesses. By utilizing these tools, you can avoid investing heavily in services and tools you don't need. We suggest due diligence to investigate these free options based on organizational needs. Follow us on IG for marketing tips.

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The Digital Age is Changing Community Outreach Marketing, and it could help or hinder Non-Profits

Thu, 02 Feb 2023 11:00:00 -0500

What happens when organizations that rely heavily on community support begin to see their non-profit peers charge them to spread the word?

“Sure, we’ll help distribute your message about this extremely valuable resource to the communities and groups we also claim to support but first you must pay us!” Sounds a bit harsh, but it is a rather sarcastic way of paraphrasing actual responses my team and I have heard in our line of work.

Non-profit organizations thrive with low-cost creative strategies that can make a big impact. To afford the luxury of having a marketing and advertising budget, non-profits must fundraise. However, fundraising also requires dollars to reach donors. It becomes quite the paradox. The simplest and most cost-effective method to meet these goals is through community partnerships and outreach.

Medium.com defines community outreach marketing as “the standard strategic way to help increase awareness about your products or services. It is a strategy for searching out organizations or groups that have a shared or dependent interest in what your business has to offer.” Precisely. Yet the digital age is changing the way non-profit organizations work together. Everyone wants to monetize their social platforms. What was once a no-cost request, is now requiring orgs to rethink where their advertising dollars will go.

The evolution of technology coupled with the new norm of socializing virtually has given non-profits a new way to earn capital. Organizations with a huge social media following and newsletter subscribers are turning to an influencer style of helping their partners, stakeholders, and non-profit peers.

Let’s take a moment to reflect here. As always, there are two sides to every story. You can’t help but to give kudos to the non-profits that have successfully created another revenue stream by monetizing their digital audiences. On the contrary, non-profits with smaller audiences and limited capital are further stretched and puzzled with deciding how to allocate their budgets. Should they spend their money on advertising externally or hire someone internally to grow their own audience? Adding to the dilemma is determining where you will get the greatest return on your investment. Do you spend with non-profits that have a similar target audience or with major publications that are less targeted but reaching the masses?

I would say, do all the above. Establishing a not-for-profit operation does not mean your organization should not be profitable. All ethical methods for earning revenue should be explored. Non-profits should reconsider the value of their marketing and digital teams and explore how growing those departments can help them better reach their desired audiences more effectively. I have found spreading your dollars among multiple channels is more effective than investing large sums of money with just a few outlets.

Nevertheless, for every cause there is an effect. Consequently, the non-profits that want to step into this game are going to have to be ready to deliver metrics like the pros. If you’re charging for eblasts or social media posts, you should be ready and willing to share your metrics. Here are a few data points that you should collect and deliver:

How many people are on your list?
Are you able to segment your list by demographics or interests?
What percentage of your database opens your emails?
What is the average click-through rate of those who open your emails?
What were the demographics of those that responded to the email?

If you have no idea how to answer any of the questions above, you are probably not ready to charge for your digital currency. This new way of spreading the word is also trickling down to non-profits needing to establish formal partner agreements as issues and laws surrounding cyber conduct are growing rapidly. In other words, before you begin charging to post on your digital platform, check-in with your insurance company and your lawyer.

“We have certainly begun to explore new ways to enhance our sponsorship offerings with for-profit organizations,” says Alyssa Perna, Managing Director at Ingenuity Cleveland. “One of our partners wanted to promote an educational program geared towards supporting creative entrepreneurship which is also our core audience. We added dedicated social media posts and newsletter blurbs into their package. This was a win-win scenario,” says Perna. “We earned more sponsorship dollars while driving awareness about an initiative beneficial to both Ingenuity and our partners audiences.”

I am personally interested to see how the evolution of technology will begin to blur the lines of ethics for non-profit organizations. I would encourage not-for-profit organizations to utilize this new way of community outreach marketing to gain revenue from the for-profit stakeholders they support. When it comes to your non-profit peers, there should be a more mutually beneficial arrangement. After all, almost all non-profits are engaged in supporting causes that are closely tied to one another and targeting the same individuals and communities. Where one organization fails, those connected to similar missions fail too. Cleveland area organizations are long overdue for learning how to move forward together to maximize their individual efforts. The last thing we need is our non-profits competing for dollars and attention.