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How to Advertise Your Business to Generation Z

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Generation Z|How to Advertise Your Business to Generation ZMove over Millennials, because Generation Z is here. These new kids on the block are slowly but surely leaving college, getting jobs, earning their own wages, and taking control of all the world’s buying power.

Gen Z is set to have the buying power in the palms of their hands for at least the next ten years, so if your business is to survive throughout the ‘20s, you’re going to have to consistently find a way to appeal to this young audience. To do that, you’re going to have to advertise your company in a way that engages and interests them.

To find out how you can advertise your business to Generation Z, be sure to read on.

Work on your online reputation

Many experts have determined that the first Generation Zers were born in 1995 and the last were born in 2012. This means that this generation, also aptly named the iGen, has grown up blissfully unaware that there was once a world in which the web did not exist. Having had the internet quite literally at their fingertips for as long as they can remember, one thing is for sure: Generation Z is incredibly well versed when it comes to searching the web, so you won’t be able to pull the wool over their eyes in this instance. They will search your company online, they will find what they’re looking for and, ultimately, they’ll decide whether to bring you their custom based on the information/content that they unearth.

If you’re to stand a chance of advertising your business in the best possible light via the web, you’re going to need to work on your online reputation. Fortunately, there are companies out there that can assist you in this instance, meaning you don’t have to go it alone.

Typically, a reputation management company such as Reputation Rhino will leverage the following tactics in their bid to boost your online presence by:

  • Monitoring online mentions
  • Publishing professionally written content
  • Interlinking high-impact content
  • Optimizing social media profiles
  • Editing or removing negative content

Work alongside influencers

Generation Z spends most of their time scrolling through their feeds and keeping up with the updates on their timelines. The fact that they use social media so regularly means that you must advertise on the likes of Twitter and Instagram if you’re to stand a chance of reaching your young audience.

When you do decide to market via social media, a good piece of advice is to work alongside influencers. These are people that post photo and video content promoting certain products and/or services.  You can also collaborate with Twitter and Instagram marketing agencies.

When looking for an influencer to collaborate with, it’s important that you don’t set your sights too high. Don’t attempt to partner up with world-famous celebrities like Cristiano Ronaldo, Kim Kardashian, or Ariana Grande because, even if you do miraculously get through to their PR teams, they’re going to charge boatloads of cash to advertise your products for you. Instead, set your stall out a bit lower and seek to reach out to ‘micro-influencers.’ These are people that have a social following of between 1,000 and 100,000.

To set your business up for a decade’s worth of success, you’re going to need to start appealing to Generation Z as soon as you possibly can.

Seven must-haves of a marketing communication strategy

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article|Marketing|Seven must-haves of a marketing communication strategyAs an owner of your business, your first and foremost goal is to attract maximum revenues and sales. Unless you master this skill, your business will always go through uncertain scenarios and yearn for stability. Do you know why some of the brands are particularly good at this job? it’s because they have crafted an impeccable marketing communication strategy.

Marketing communication strategy is a broad term that covers so many small aspects. However, you should not miss out on the following must-haves while designing a marketing communication plan for your company.

Identify Your Target Audience

If you don’t have in-depth information about your audience, you can’t expect any of your marketing campaigns to be successful or even come close to the desired results. The same stands true here. The more information you have about your customers, the better it is.

You can develop buyer personas around questions like:

  • Who currently buying your products?
  • Which geographical location is adding most to your bottom line?
  • Which pain points are pushing people to purchase from your brand?
  • Which age group and gender are more inclined towards your products?

Answers of these questions will give you a complete picture of your target audience. You can find out more about your online customers through Google Analytics and other tools.

However, in case your brand is fresh and lacks the necessary details to build buyer personas, you should invest in surveys and researches. Once you have identified the target market, you don’t have to be an exceptional salesman to deal with customers. When people are getting what they are looking for, why you would have to influence them?

Come up with an effective branding message and Be Consistent

Every famous brand has done and achieved this. Brand messaging is something that can be dubbed as the philosophy of your brand. The brand message is what appeals to the audience, makes them curious and eventually pushes them to buy your product.

Begin with the tagline. It should be woven into words in such a way that people do not have to put any effort to remember it. Apart from that, you should craft a single paragraph conveying your brand values and the mission you want to accomplish. You can even assess the effectiveness of the message with a certain group of people before finally settling for it.

Remember, people will forget your tagline if you don’t repeat it everywhere. So being consistent is very important. Be it your social media accounts, website or application, your tagline should be all over the place to represent your business.

Uncover your business objectives

Increasing sales, expanding reach, and building brand awareness: all of them are the key objectives for any business. Some owners would like to take one thing at a time. They would pick one objective first and then the others will follow. So if you happen to be one of those businessmen, it is obligatory for you to outline the particular objective you want to achieve first and then move on to the second one and so on.

At times when you are trying to incorporate too many things in your marketing campaign, people don’t get a clear message and walk away out of sheer confusion. How can you be successful when people don’t know what you are trying to convey to them?

Focus on the unique selling proposition

A unique selling proposition (USP) means emphasizing one factor that makes you “unique” from the rest of the competition. Here, you need not mention the features which people readily find in the other products. In other words, USP is a problem that nobody can solve better than you.

When you want people to change their old brand and shift to yours, the first thing they ask is “what makes your brand different than the others?” That’s where USP swings into action. People won’t come to you unless you address their pain points better than others. To sum up, a compelling USP separates you from “noise” and gives you “voice”.

Pick the right marketing mix

Today, we have too many podcast hosting sites to market a brand. We are no more limited to billboards, print media or TV advertisements. There are options like email marketing, content writing, social media and much more. However, the drawback of having too many alternatives is that you could pick the wrong medium where you may or may not find your targeted audience and end up wasting your resources.

For example, if you choose to market your brand on social media then you have to realize all social media channels are not the same. What appeals to a Facebook user might not charm an Instagram user. That’s where you have to pick and choose very smartly. Make sure you don’t throw all your eggs in one basket. Always market on a variety of platforms for good results.

In order to be on top of your media campaign, you need to have a calendar by your side and schedule your posts at optimal times. if you feel confusion, SEO service in Singapore can help you to design the best digital marketing strategy that will make a clear strategy for you to woo your online customers.

Determine success metrics

As they say “what can be measured, can be improved”. You must measure your performance to know where you are heading so that if the performance is not up to the mark, you can improve it. The list of various key performance indicators (KPI) is given below:

  • Social media shares
  • Number of website visits
  • Number of leads generated
  • Mentions on social media
  • Backlinks acquired from quality websites
  • Retention rate on your website
  • Number of followers on social media channels

As you can see, every platform has different criteria for performance. There are so many other metrics that we have not mentioned here, for example, likes and retweets. It is because relying on these metrics will not do any good for you.

Communicate your success to people

Once you are done with measuring your success, make sure you share it with your audience. It is a way to thank your consumers and make them feel important for being part of your success journey. Of course, nobody would like to be a part of a failing business. That way, not only old customers will show more faith in you but new ones will also start to engage.

The final verdict

As mentioned above, a marketing communication strategy is a blend of a variety of things. You can’t take any of them lightly. From the first to the last step, all of them need to be undertaken with thorough planning. We have sketched out the must-haves of an ideal marketing communication strategy, you just have to implement them and wait to be awed by the results.

How Digital Marketing Impacts Business Growth

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There were an estimated 3.9 billion Internet users in 2017, according to data compiled by Statista. Indeed, the vast majority of people no longer get their information from traditional media, but instead search for information on the Internet using various devices, including desktop computers, tablets, and mobile devices.

If your business isn’t implementing the latest and most cutting-edge digital marketing methods (such as search engine optimization, content marketing, influencer marketing, and social media marketing), then you’ll lose out to business competitors who’re more adept at adopting — and harnessing — the best practices.

Listed below are some of the reasons why your company should adopt some of the latest digital marketing practices to stay ahead of the competition.

4 Reasons Why Your Business Needs a Dynamic Digital Marketing Strategy

Google Search is the way of the future

Google’s search engine now represents 90.46% of the global search engine market, and the site receives over 63,000 searches each second on any given day. Even if your company has an official website, if it isn’t showing up on Google’s search results, you will be losing out in terms of revenue, customer acquisition, and business growth.

Coupled with the fact that Google’s search algorithm is getting better at understanding the nuances, intent, and context of its users’ searches means that it’s getting better at serving accurate and relevant results to its users.

But how do these developments impact your business? Well, for starters, if your site lacks the information that users are searching for, then Google is highly unlikely to rank your web pages in its search results. And even if your site is updated with the right business information and contains great content, if it isn’t optimized correctly, it’s not going to attain the rankings and traffic that will positively impact your business growth.

SEO helps drive traffic and conversions to your site

Now more than ever, a dynamic and cohesive SEO strategy is needed to keep your website positioned strategically on Google’s unpaid (or organic) search results. But what exactly is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization. The discipline consists of multiple strategies, best practices, and actions that are utilized with the end goal of improving your website’s position on the search engine results pages (also known as SERPs). There are two types of SEO: on-page and off-page. The former consists of elements you can control on your site to improve your position on the SERPs, while the latter consists of actions done on other websites to boost your site’s position on the SERPs and overall authority.

If your business lacks the expertise to devise and implement a viable SEO strategy, then you’ll need to hire a great SEO specialist or outsource the task to a reputable digital marketing firm.

Content marketing drives profitable customer action

According to the Content Marketing Institute, content marketing “is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”

The practices and objectives of content marketing are closely aligned with inbound marketing, which is a business methodology that aims to attract customers to products and services by serving them useful and actionable content at every stage of their journey to becoming loyal customers.

Great content comes in the form of blog posts, white papers, downloadable reports, videos, and other types of consumer media that prospective customers will need to educate themselves to make informed decisions—one of which is opting to become loyal customers and advocates of your brand.

An effective content marketing strategy will require the expertise of seasoned editors, writers, and content strategists. And these professionals will need to align their goals with those of SEO specialists to drive targeted traffic to your site and web assets. As with SEO, if your organization lacks the expertise or bandwidth to accommodate a content marketing strategy, then it’s best to hire specialists or outsource to the right digital marketing firm.

Social media marketing strengthens your brand

Billions of people around the world now use social media platforms to connect with others, reach out to brands, and consume media. Facebook—the world’s largest social media website—now attracts 2.41 billion monthly active users as of the second quarter of 2019, according to Statista. Facebook users harness this platform not just to connect with others in their circle, but also to discover and engage with brands and companies, and consume entertainment and other media.

Instagram, another popular social media site that deals with pictorial and video content sharing, has one billion monthly active users, making it the third most popular social media site after Facebook and YouTube. Considering the sheer number of eyeballs that can be found on these platforms, your brand or company cannot afford to remain anonymous on them.

A strong and engaging presence on social media can help your company achieve the following:

  • Boosted brand awareness
  • More inbound traffic
  • Improved conversion rates
  • Increased brand loyalty and authority
  • Improved search engine rankings

The immense rewards aside, social media marketing requires great ingenuity, creativity, and dedication to drive results. You’ll need to hire the right specialists or outsource the work to an awesome digital marketing or social media management company if you want this done right.

Other Business Benefits of Digital Marketing

Improves Lead Generation

A cohesive and dynamic digital marketing strategy that utilizes the right methodology and marketing methods will result in improved lead generation for your business. What’s more, most digital marketing methods are far cheaper than more traditional marketing outlets, such as buying ads in magazines or booking TV airtime for commercials. The rewards, on the other hand, are considerable, as you could potentially reach a global audience of thousands or even millions.

Improved Conversion Rates

If you’re using digital marketing to successfully guide your leads down the conversion funnel, the end result should be improved conversion rates. Another great thing about digital marketing is that you can use data and analytics tools — such as Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and Kissmetrics — to better understand your website users. By objectively analyzing your traffic information, you can make adjustments to your conversion funnel and better understand what makes your target audience tick.

How e-commerce Helps Build your Brand

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |E-Commerce |How e-commerce Helps Build your BrandBranding! A word with which everyone is familiar but do not understand its profundity. It requires a lot of effort from the business to propose the idea of branding. The outcome of successful branding is the growth of the product or service, triggered by a strategic marketing plan of the product. The main idea behind keeping your brand consistent is, however, a promise of quality which customers expect from you.

Association of the customer is the measurement of the loyalty of the customers with your product. Despite your best branding efforts, the customer must ultimately decide to continue with the product or not. You absolutely can understand with the customers’ behavior that what your customers’ expectations are and how far your product is to meet with the customers’ expectations, also known as ecommerce fulfilment.

How digital media promote business in the contemporary world

To grab on customers’ minds, marketing tactics have a peculiar position. In order to meet customers’ expectations digital, and traditional media has tremendously blasted to support the businesses. However, this decade can see the importance of digital media in advertisement and development of the product. There is nothing left in your marketing, which e-channels do not support. From promotion to selling and from launching to customers’ feedback, all the work is done using an e-commerce platform.

The advancement of the e-platform of marketing took place because the customers have switched from the real world to the virtual world. It means they have started using virtual channels to talk with their faraway relatives using their androids. You have got it! Yes, it is social media that connects people from distant places. Thus, businesses have also transformed their promotions to the social media network.

Social Media Marketing (SMM)

An important aspect of digital marketing is Social Media Marketing (SMM). SMM has been formulated observing trends of the people towards social media. When companies find their target audience on social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, or LinkedIn, they begin promoting their products on social media platforms.

Knowing the concern of the businesses, the social media channels have also extended their features for the advertisers. They have provided different online pages for the companies who can promote the launch or innovation of the products. Most common features of the social media embrace

  • Promotional campaigns give consistency in the campaign of the brand, which is very important for brand recognition.
  • Customers can give their feedback on social media platforms about the product. It not only helps in the promotion of the products but also complies with the enhancement of features of the product.
  • Users get aware of the features of the product. They can easily check for the positive or negative reviews about your product.
  • Your company receives feedback using the social media channel, either it is positive or negative. Loyal customers of the company give positive and negative feedback both for the product. Positive reviews enhance sales of the brand, and negative feedback provides the opportunity to the business to improve the brand.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

The world has seen the advancement of digital platforms from the end of the last century. The e-commerce channels are updating as Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. have enhanced their features, which are renowned search engines. Search Engine Optimization (SEO), thus, has become another essential tool for the digital advertisement and brand development of the brands.

SEO is the ranking of a company’s product, which appears instantly in any search engine when a consumer searches for a product. SEO enhances the ranking of the company. This is the reason that companies maintain their online presence and provide benefits of reaching to the customers directly. Apart from it, SEO is maintained by the corporations to increase the website ranking so that consumer will see their brand as they search for it.

If a business wants to appear on the first page of the search engine, it should be maintaining an SEO friendly page of the company. It is very difficult to achieve high rankings on Google, Bing or Yahoo – but if the business idea is unique, then your brand visibility will increase. For instance, Amazon is a pioneer of online shopping therefore, whenever customers search to buy something online, Amazon appears on the top.

Appearing on the top search enhances your visibility to the customers. Thus, your brand gets sustained in the marketplace as you reach to more users. If your business provides online delivery of the product, your brand becomes more convenient because customers want doorstep delivery. So, it is also helpful in your brand development to give the convenience of shopping to your consumers.

Must-have business services every start-up should consider

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StrategyDriven Starting Your Business Article |Start-up|Must-have business services every start-up should considerBritain is, according to a report in The Telegraph, “a booming nation of start-ups.” In fact, around 660,000 new companies are registered in the UK every year.

Starting a new company is hugely exciting. It is also a risk. The fact is, as many as 60 per cent of new businesses go to the wall in the first three years, and 20 per cent fail within just 12 months.

Making a success of a start-up and growing your idea into a viable business can be achieved if you embrace two rules.

Firstly, learning from mistakes is key (including learning from the mistakes of other start-ups) – there will be blunders and you’ll have to learn how to be agile and recover from them. The second and equally important part of any successful start-up journey is knowing when to invest in help.

Here I’ll be focusing on the five must-have business services every start-up should consider.

  • Funding and business planning
  • HR advice
  • Digital marketing and SEO
  • Intellectual Property rights
  • Business coaching

Let’s take a look at each of them in more detail.

Funding and business planning for start-ups

Researching possible funding avenues and finding an investor isn’t easy, especially when you are starting out and have a huge number of tasks to complete in order to set up your venture. Seeking the advice of a business adviser could be worth the investment. A business adviser can help you with your business plan, and give invaluable advice on possible funding avenues.

Business advisors and chartered accountants, Wellden Turnbull, say that it is astonishing how many start-ups set out without a well-thought out plan. They say that 1.5 million SMEs do not have a business plan and that it is often the lack of a plan that catches small businesses out.

HR Advice

As soon as you take on your first employee, you will need to ramp up your understanding of HR – that’s human resources. You’ll need to know which HR regulations you’ll need to adhere to and how to deal with all sorts of employee-related issues, such as absenteeism and sick pay, paying a fair wage, calculating holidays, overtime, dealing with staff complaints and much more.

Your employees are a precious resource – get the management of them wrong and you could lose them or worse find yourself at a tribunal. Every start-up needs a minimum level of HR knowledge – if you don’t have clue, you’ll need to learn fast or seek some professional HR advice.

Digital marketing and SEO

Getting noticed online is now more important to business success than ever before. Why? Nowadays everything happens online. Digital marketing is a cost-effective way to promote your business and can put you in a position to compete with established businesses which are much larger than yours.

While setting up a website, email marketing and social media are perfectly do-able in-house, optimising your website to move up the Google rankings is quite involved and requires a certain amount of technical skill.
Seeking help from an SEO professional to ensure your website is mobile-friendly, easy to navigate, fast-loading, and has backlinks from authoritative sources is worth the investment.

Intellectual Property rights

The World Trade Organisation (WTO) defines Intellectual Property rights as “the rights given to persons over the creations of their minds.” Also known as IP rights, Intellectual Property rights give the creator an exclusive right over the use of his/her creation for a set period of time.

IP is protected by extensive laws and disputes are common – in fact, there are specialist lawyers who only work on IP cases. There are two main categories for IP protection – Copyright, and Industrial Property (which includes things like trademarks and patents).

Why is IP important for start-ups? When you have a unique idea for a business, there will always be people who will want to steal your idea, so it is important to protect them. In order to prevent your IP being exploited by others it would be prudent to seek specialist advice. For a checklist on protecting your Intellectual Property, see here.

Business coaching

One-to-one coaching or mentoring when you are setting up a business may seem like an extravagance, but it could actually be the best investment you ever make. Research suggests that working with a business coach can increase your profit margin by an average of 46 per cent.

While there is plenty of information out there to help you get your business started, there’s nothing quite like personalised custom advice. Business coaches are usually expert entrepreneurs who know what it takes to make a start-up succeed.

A business coach will train you in the skills you need and teach you how to set goals and grow your brand.
Choosing the right business coach to work with is obviously important. Get this right and your start-up could be catapulted to success.