5 reasons reviews are essential to marketing

Reviews are essential to marketing, and their importance cannot be overstated.

Reviews, essentialpart of marketing

Here are 5 reasons why:

Social Proof: Reviews act as social proof and provide credibility to your brand. When potential customers see positive reviews from other customers, they are more likely to trust your business and make a purchase.

Customer Engagement: Reviews provide an opportunity for customers to engage with your brand. When customers leave reviews, they are providing feedback that you can use to improve your products or services.

SEO Benefits: Reviews can help boost your search engine rankings. Search engines like Google take into account the number and quality of reviews when ranking websites.

Brand Reputation: Reviews can also impact your brand’s reputation. A high number of positive reviews can enhance your reputation, while negative reviews can damage it. Responding to both positive and negative reviews can help you build a strong brand reputation.

Sales: Reviews can also increase sales. According to a study by BrightLocal, 91% of consumers between the ages of 18 and 34 trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. Positive reviews can lead to more sales, while negative reviews can lead to lost sales.

The most important review platforms are:

  • First and foremost Google (with a Google Business Profile, previously called Google My Business) Google is the #1 search engine and a good, optimized Google business profile will pop up in most cases showing Google reviews
  • Yelp if you are in the restaurant/hospitality business and some types of service businesses
  • Travel sites if you are in the hospitality industry
  • Major shopping sites if you sell products

Overall, reviews are a crucial part of marketing that can help you build trust, engage with customers, improve your search rankings, enhance your brand reputation, and increase sales.

Social Media Best ROI

Which social media channels have the best ROI?

As any marketer knows, social media is an undeniably powerful tool to reach new audiences and connect with existing customers.

In fact, as of 2021, social media is now the #1 channel used by marketers.

But with all that Tweeting, Liking, Posting, and scrolling, it can be difficult to know which platforms give you the most bang for your buck.

Sure, it’s important to ensure your brand interacts on whichever platforms are most popular with your audience, but it’s equally critical you take the time to determine which platforms provide the best ROI for your business. This information can help you determine where to invest in paid advertising, as well as which channels you should use for lead generation.

However, social media usage can shift overnight. The platforms that provided marketers with the highest ROI five years ago likely don’t deliver the same results anymore. That’s why we conducted research to find out where marketers saw the highest ROI in 2021.

Here, we’ll explore which channels provided marketers with the highest ROI in 2021. We also reached out to experts at Talkwalker, Socialinsider, Casted, Brandfolder, LiveChat, Sprout Social, MarketingLabs, and HubSpot to determine how marketers can leverage certain tactics within those channels to increase engagement and drive sales. Let’s dive in

Which social media channels have the best ROI?

the social channels marketers see highest ROI from in 2021

 According to HubSpot’s 2021 State of Marketing report, Facebook is the social media channel that provides marketers with the highest ROI.

Over 40% of marketers cited Facebook as the most effective channel for their businesses, followed by the roughly 30% who saw the highest ROI from Instagram, which is another Facebook-owned social platform.

By comparison, the other social channels in the list — including LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, and Snapchat — all ranked much lower, with less than 10% citing each platform as the best channel for ROI.

Let’s dive into each of these platforms to uncover why the top 3 social media sites perform better than others when it comes to ROI — and how you can leverage them.

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Reviews Drive Perception

positive vs negative reviews

Positive or negative, reviews drive perception

You should monitor reviews and respond to them.

If they are positive, thank the reviewer. If they are negative address them honestly. Don’t ignore them. Customers and prospects will react based on the way you respond.

A negative review is an opportunity to turn a critic into a happy customer who will promote your business or will confirm their opinion. When it comes to prospects, your response will help them decide if they want to do business with you or not. Be positive, be constructive, honest and transparent.

reviews-drive-perception

3 Strategic Pillars For a Winning Content Strategy

To achieve success with content 60% of the most successful B2B marketers use a documented winning content strategy centering on three key pillars

winning content strategy

Many skilled and experienced marketers still struggle to understand what’s so difficult about content marketing.

On the surface, it seems deceptively simple: You get some writers and designers together, create compelling content, publish it where your audience is likely to find it, and wait for the customer calls and purchases to roll in.

But eventually, you realize doing this bare minimum won’t get you far. A lot more work needs to happen behind the scenes to deliver initial success – and keep it properly fueled, focused, and functional over the long term. And that doesn’t even include securing buy-in for your content marketing business case in the first place.

There’s no quick or easy shortcut for achieving success with content. But there is a reliable process that, according to CMI’s 2021 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends research, 60% of the most successful B2B marketers have a documented content marketing strategy. That winning content strategy should center on three key pillars:

  • Why – the marketing and business goals to achieve and the reason to create content as opposed to other marketing techniques
  • Who – the audience to serve through your efforts, who they are, what they need, and what path they follow in their customer journey
  • How – the unique brand mission or story, what sets your content apart from anything else your audience might choose to engage with and act on

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Social Media Platforms Leaders And Challengers

Which are today’s social media platforms leaders and challengers?

Paid social media’s oligarchy, made up of Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, may soon have to share the crown as competing social media platforms are getting a second look from advertisers. 

social media platforms leaders and challengers

As the pandemic pushed advertisers to follow shoppers online and Apple’s latest data privacy crackdown has made tracking capabilities harder on Facebook.  As a result, conversation around media spend diversification has moved from water cooler talk to a plan in action. 

Facebook and Instagram are still the crème de la crème when it comes to social media ad spend thanks to its tremendous scale and unmatched targeting capabilities, according to media buyers. However, platforms like TikTok, Pinterest and Snapchat have upped the ante with their own offerings. Advertisers are starting to take notice. 

Media buyers say platforms like LinkedIn, Triller, Twitch and Reddit have audiences that are too niche to cater to mass scale general audiences.

To get a sense of the landscape ahead of the fourth quarter, Digiday spoke with five social media experts and media buyers, who shared their thoughts on the current social media landscape, weighing on who’s winning big this year and who will take the crown in 2022. 

So, what are today’s social media platforms leaders and challengers?

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Ethics: Put Your Money Where Your Mouth is

When it comes to ethics, “Put your money where your mouth is”. Turns out many people do just that. They shop their values. When consumers believe a brand has a strong purpose, they’re four times more likely to purchase from that company and four and a half times more likely to recommend it to family and friends.

Consumers also have the power to punish unethical or noncompliant behavior — and that’s a genuine fear among risk managers. According to data from Willis Towers Watson, 86 percent of risk managers ranked loss of income or reduced customer base as the worst outcome from reputational damage. Many of them also feared loss of talent and becoming less attractive as an employer.

And that risk is more real than ever. Many workers seek an engaging, supportive and ethical workplace experience, and they are increasingly willing to walk if they don’t find it. Here’s how to cultivate a sense of ownership and pride over workplace ethics and compliance.

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Choosing a Social Media Platform Part 1

twitter facebook instagram

The Demographics

To find out what social media platform you should use, the first thing is to know at least the basic demographics of each platform to answer a basic question:  are the people I want to reach on that platform.  We will look at the 3 largest consumer focused social media platforms:  Twitter, Facebook and Instagram

According to Pew Research:

Twitter Demographics

Facebook Demographics 

Instagram Demographics

Source: Hubspot Marketing and Pew Research

Content Marketing Statistics for 2021

Important Content Marketing Statistics For 2021:

  • 47% of buyers view three to five pieces of content before engaging with a sales rep.
  • 82% of marketers report actively using content marketing in 2021, up 70% from last year.
  • Marketers’ primary goals for running marketing campaigns are brand awareness, increasing sales, and increasing engagement.
  • Video is  overtaking blogs and infographics to become the most commonly used form of content marketing,.
  • Google’s search algorithms are trying to transcend text to images, voice/podcasts, and videos.
  • The top technologies used by B2B organizations to supplement content marketing are analytics tools, social media publishing, and email marketing software.
  • The top three organic content distribution channels for B2B marketers are social media channels, email, and website.

Source: Hubspot Marketing and Content Marketing Institute

Facebook Fake Profiles Warning

Recently we have seen something a massive wave of Facebook fake profiles, something I had not seen, on that scale, in my 10+ years working on Facebook and social media in general and being on Facebook.

There is, as we speak, a massive wave of fake profiles being created, most of them spoofing existing profiles and targetting the connections to that profile and their connections.

I have to assume it’s either because of:

  • The upcoming elections and a massive wave of fake news and disinformation using Facebook as we have seen during the 2016 campaign
  • The holiday shopping season

They know that a vast majority of people share content without vetting the facts, they trust their friends to do research before posting or sharing, that’s how fake news, conspiracy theories and scams go viral

What can you do?  A lot:

  • Stop accepting invitations to connect from people you don’t know
  • If a profile is light on information or was created recently, pretending to be a cute guy or girl, it’s likely fake, report it and block it
  • If a friend you are already connected to asks you to connect again, it’s likely a spoofed profile, look at the number of postings and the information, do a search to see if it is a duplicate
  • If your friend’s profile has been spoofed, let him know and report the fake profile to Facebook, they are pretty good at deleting them.
  • If you are tagged in a post peddling cheap brand name goods, free airline tickets, free cars and other similar posts, report the post as spam, report the page to Facebook
  • Do a search on your name on Facebook to see if your profile has been spoofed; if it has been spoofed warn your friends and report the fake profile to Facebook

We all have to do our part to stop fake news, conspiracy theories and scams and it starts with being smart on Facebook