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Attention Social Media Marketers! Here’s What You Should Know about Inclusiveness on Social Media

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article, Attention Social Media Marketers! Here’s What You Should Know about Inclusiveness on Social Media

At nearly 4 billion users, more than half of the world’s population now uses social media to connect with not just each other but also with brands. Needless to say, your social media audience is an extremely diverse bunch of individuals with varied interests, beliefs, and abilities.

To cater to them all in the best way possible, you’ll need to consider inclusiveness in your social media marketing efforts. People expect the companies they do business with to take a stand – in fact, 70% of U.S. consumers say it’s important for brands to take a stand on social and political issues.

But inclusiveness is not just about taking a stand on global issues. It covers a diverse range of subjects, from racial justice and gender equality to content accessibility and hate speech.

In this post, let’s learn more about these inclusivity issues and how you can address them in your social media marketing strategy.

Go Beyond a Corporate Statement With a Social Strategy

A corporate statement tells your audience about your beliefs, but a long-term social media strategy shows them how your brand is taking real action.

It goes beyond announcing a charitable donation and proves that diversity, equality, and inclusion is a long-term commitment for your brand. Create a social media strategy to highlight your employees’ actions and your company’s ongoing work towards more inclusivity.

For instance, if one of your initiatives focuses on internal education and dialogue about racial justice, you can share the activities that your team is doing with your followers. If your team is doing volunteering, highlight their stories and experiences in serving the community.

To go beyond a mere corporate statement about inclusiveness and demonstrate real action, here are a few things you can have in your social media marketing strategy:

  • Research how issues like racism and gender inequality impact your industry and create and promote content or resources like books, podcasts, thought leadership, etc. on how to tackle these issues.
  • Get your company involved in a movement and frequent volunteering or fundraising activities, and invite your followers to do the same.
  • Learn about your company’s past and existing efforts, and build a plan to convey your employees’ stories and actions on social media..

Use Gender-Neutral Language, Emojis, and Imagery

When addressing a general audience on social media, use inclusive pronouns like “they/them” rather than “he/she” and avoid language biased to one gender, such as “mankind” or “guys”.

Also, when responding to comments or posts, do not assume the person’s gender, but instead, address them by their name or username. UN Women has a comprehensive set of guidelines on writing in a gender-inclusive way.

This extends to the emojis you use, too. Avoid gendered emojis if possible and opt for the default yellow emojis when addressing a diverse audience.

Simply put, using non-gendered and default yellow emojis when engaging with a universal audience, or multiple colors of emojis when portraying a broad audience can greatly contribute to creating a strong sense of inclusiveness in your social media presence.

Furthermore, if you use stock visuals in your social media, understand that stock images are often littered with gender and racial biases, and there aren’t many options when trying to source inclusive images.

Use platforms like nappy and Canva’s Natural Women Collection the next time you need a stock image that truly embraces diversity and inclusivity. And when designing any new marketing material (flyers, banners, icons, etc.), make sure to let your graphic designer know that you’re committed to representing diversity and inclusion.

Create Content That’s Accessible to Everyone

While on the subject of designing graphics for your social media marketing, inclusiveness is also about ensuring all your content is accessible to everyone, regardless of their disabilities.

You might already know that having an accessible website is mandatory today, with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) extending to digital properties too. Essentially, an accessible website is one that accommodates all visitors on all devices irrespective of the physical or mental ability of the user.

With an estimated 26.9 million adult Americans claiming they either have trouble seeing or are unable to see at all, if you don’t prioritize accessibility, it’s likely that you’re unwittingly shunning a considerable chunk of your audience from engaging with your content on both your website and social media. Not to mention accessibility is also important to avoid ADA lawsuits, which are on the rise.

To make your website accessible, you can take many steps yourself, such as ensuring logical content hierarchy (with subheadings), adding alt text for all images, adding descriptive labels to form elements, and making your site keyboard-friendly. Making all of these adjustments basically mean to adhere to the ADA compliance guidelines.

For social media, in particular, make sure to create graphics with sufficient color contrast so that the visually impaired can also consume the content. When posting videos, always include closed captions or subtitles.

Also, when posting on Instagram, go to Advanced Settings and then Write Alt Text to add a descriptive alt text for your posts. This way, you make your content more accessible to the visually impaired audience who’re using screen readers.

Remove Offensive Comments

If you haven’t already, sooner or later you’ll receive comments on your posts that are misogynistic, racist, homophobic, or hateful in nature. Such comments that are offensive to any group of people should have no place on your brand’s social media presence.

By not engaging and instantly removing these types of comments, your followers can appreciate your company’s intolerance and firm stance against hate speech. If you are not able to remove comments on some social review platforms, develop a strategy to tactfully respond to such spiteful comments, and demonstrate your brand’s values.

Final Words

Inclusivity isn’t just an HR initiative that’s limited to your workplace — it should be built into your company culture that extends to all your brand messaging and marketing as well.

Sure, it’ll take some time and effort, but working with your marketing team to create an inclusive social media presence goes a long way in increasing your content’s value, reach, engagement, and overall brand image.

Essential Elements Of A Business Website in 2021

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article, Essential Elements Of A Business Website in 2021

Early adopters of the internet will remember just how odd our early engagements with the web were. While there was increasing access to the web from the middle of the 1990s, Google didn’t arrive until 1998, and wasn’t in particularly widespread usage for a while after that. Often, as an early adopter, you would type in a URL from a piece of paper you’d scrawled it upon, and this would take you to a website with a background that made overly heavy use of graphics. It was probably a GeoCities effort, built by someone hoping to drive business by using the new, exciting World Wide Web.

How far we have come, when most businesses now have their own websites, and few of them are as migraine-inducingly messy as they used to be. Now, the issue is less one of wholesale changes, and more one of details. If you want your website to be all it can be now, it is a matter of finding a few tweaks here and there. However, those changes are still important, because everyone is on the internet these days, and a small change in the way your site works can give you a change in traffic that looks small – but which, in such a competitive atmosphere, can be monumental for your business. Such changes include the following:

Hooking the viewer within the first few seconds

There is something to be gained by remembering the eyesore websites of the mid-1990s when you are designing a website for the present day. One of the issues with early websites is that there was simply too much going on, and it wasn’t very well organised. The chances of someone staying for long on a website that does that today are next to none. If you want someone to stick around on your site, then the first thing they see needs to be clean, uncluttered and at the same time somehow informative.

Ideally, the home page will operate as a menu in the first instance. From here you should be able to navigate to anywhere else on the site within two clicks, and it should be easy to see how you do that. Here is not where you use a lot of pictures, text or graphics, because that can be visually off-putting, and the one rule of a decent home page is to not give anyone a reason to click away to something else right away. All you need on the first view of your site is a navigation menu, and potentially the basics of some content – if your site is an online store, perhaps have a banner that takes visitors straight to some of your most popular products or ranges. Nothing flashier than that, though – don’t overwhelm anyone.

Getting the ideal Content Management System in place

Continuing the theme of how different the internet was a couple of decades ago, it’s worth remembering that the websites back then were designed and often coded by people who put a lot of time into teaching themselves the tricks. While there were some drag-and-drop options that allowed you to build at least a home page, making a website was a labor of love – much though that may surprise a few people.

In the present day, it is easier than ever for someone with no real coding experience to create a website themselves. It’s still not necessarily always a good idea, but it is easier, and the range of options that we have for making it work is greater than ever. The level of choice we have is impressive, but you have to make sure that for you it is a blessing rather than a curse. Modern content management systems offer you the chance to radically change the look of your site and what it offers – but they can quickly become confusing if you try to do too much. Ensure you’re using a CMS that is easy to work with – because quite apart from anything, if something goes wrong and knocks your website offline, you want to be able to fix it without having to dig around for the fault.

Content is still king

A website is your own corner of the internet that allows people to learn about your business, communicate with you and maybe make a purchase or two. When people land on your website with the intention of engaging, there is a truth you need to recognize: they could, with a change of luck, have landed with any of your competitors. And if you don’t give them a user experience worthy of the name, there is still a very good chance that they will find your competitors after navigating away. You need to keep them interested with useful content, which takes time to create.

You’ll hear it said of website creation that “content is king”, and that’s an undeniably true statement. An attractive website with bad content is probably worth less than a garish website with good content, because if you can get past the visual assault at least you can enjoy reading the latter, and you’ll come back to it. If a website bores you, you’ll navigate away and not have a reason to come back. This is why website creators, or SEO agencies should focus on user engagement primarily. It could be informative blog posts, relevant video content or useful widgets, but you need to make sure your site hosts items your target customers want to see.

StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Business Website|Essential Elements Of A Business Website in 2021Everything needs to work

This rule might sound obvious, but it’s surprising how often you’ll find a site that includes broken links, features red Xs where you should be seeing pictures, or just seems to have gone wrong somehow. This website is, as we have noted, your little corner of the internet, and it is more or less constantly receiving visitors (if the SEO basics have been done right, anyway). Now, if your home was repeatedly hosting visitors, most of them strangers to you up to now, would you feel comfortable if the carpets hadn’t been hoovered, or one of your chairs was upside down? Of course not, but it’s all too easy for the digital equivalent of this to damage things for you.

A regular audit of your site, picking up on and removing broken links and images, will make the site work faster and look better. Perhaps more importantly than either of these points, it will likely ensure that your visitors are more likely to return – and when they do, they’re likely to have brought money with them. If the broken links and images are in blog posts they will usually be very simple to remove, but remember that if they are generated by the CMS backend that they may take a lot more work to either fix or remove. Also, once removed, you need to make sure that they don’t leave a glaring empty space.

Old broken links and missing pictures have much the same effect for your site that boarded-up windows would for a brick-and-mortar store – you might be open for business, but it won’t look that way.

Your “About us” page isn’t just filler

If you’ve ever used WordPress or Joomla or a similar CMS, then you’ll be used to the presence of an “About us/me/the author” section in the backend of the system. It is possible to delete this from your site, and some people choose to do so thinking that it is an unnecessary addition to the bandwidth the site will need to use. They are mistaken.

The About Us section is where people will go if they are looking out for information that isn’t immediately obvious from the rest of the site. You can include an FAQ here, but of primary importance is that you set out some information about your company. When was it founded, how many people work for you, where are you based? All of these will be useful information for someone looking to learn more about you and potentially become a customer.

Equally, this is the chance to lay out something of a mission statement, or at least lay out certain policies that your business has. If you are selling cosmetics, for example, you can include in the “About us” statement that you only handle products that are cruelty-free. If you sell coffee, you can make clear here that all of your coffees are grown under Fair Trade rules. In a market that is increasingly concerned with living up to strict ethics, this is the kind of thing that people are going to want to know – and including it in the About Us section also makes you more likely to show up when people search for “fair trade coffee” or “cruelty-free cosmetics”.

We’ve come a long way in 25 years when it comes to website building. If it sometimes feels like we have a lot further to go, it’s because the internet is so powerful it can allow us to create wonderful things. It’s worth taking the time to ensure your website has everything it needs to succeed, because the results are worth the work.

The Marketing Tools You Need to Succeed in 2021

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article, The Marketing Tools You Need to Succeed in 2021

Marketing is something of an art form, and its success often depends on the personnel involved and the toolkit that’s used. Your company might spend millions on a marketing campaign that doesn’t nearly reach your expected ROI. On the other hand a little honesty and savvy marketing know-how can accelerate your campaign beyond your wildest dreams. You will have to hire the best people for the job but you can narrow the chances of success by knowing the right tools to use as well. In this article we take a look at some of the marketing tools you need in 2021.

Buffer or Hootsuite

Both Buffer and Hootsuite give you more control and better data when managing your social media accounts. Your website host will probably allow you to schedule posts to social media but there are limitations and the data you receive back may not be sufficient. That’s why a third party software option like Buffer or Hootsuite is effective.

Buffer and Hootsuite allow you to schedule posts to multiple social media accounts at once and give you valuable response data, such as clicks, retweets, likes, favorites, mentions, and potential views. While the free version is limited to one social media account and 10 posts at any given time, a subscription can link you up with every major social media channel.

Social media was once a friendly platform for connecting with people around the world, it’s now a commercial enterprise integral to the success of brands and businesses. Around 3.8 billion people globally use social media everyday which means your business needs to engage with the medium effectively. Buffer and Hootsuite can help you make those important strategic decisions.

Wishpond

Is your website landing page looking dated or not achieving the results you expect? This might be the case with other aspects of your website as well, such as your mailing list or CRM system. Whatever the issue Wishpond can step in and help you out. It’s an affordable digital marketing suite with more than a dozen tools on offer that make your website sing like it should.

The aim of Wishpond is to help you grow your business online by making your website modern, functional, and attractive. Wishpond’s multiplicity of tools allows you to build and publish responsive web pages quickly and across all devices – you can also add various forms to the pages that popup when users visit a landing page. Wishpond will also integrate well with social media and allow you to set up promotions and contests.

If you want an all-in-one software solution that takes your online presence to the next level then consider Wishpond. It’s not only affordable but it provides you with essential software tools like departing employee computer forensics investigations, in a user-friendly format. These tools can be found in other places too but individually, and they are often more expensive.

Instagram

Are you a small business looking to gain a foothold in social media this year? If so then Instagram is your friend. Unlike the big hitters in social media, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit, Instagram has remained untouched by big business advertising. Major social media sites might be awash with established brands but Instagram manages to make space for smaller voices.

How is this possible? The answer lays in the way Instagram manages its advertising. It’s difficult for smaller businesses to gain traction on social media sites dominated by the loudest voices in the industry, and even if they do ‘get-in’ it’s next to impossible to maintain the progress. However, Instagram has an affiliate program that seems to cater more to these smaller voices.

There is nothing stopping corporate giants joining the affiliate network and proving products but for some reason they don’t gain the same traction or attention. Instead, small fashion lines, makeup brands, and esoteric products are more appealing to an Instagram audience. The Instagram audience is much more favorable to the personal connection with products rather than a slick corporate appeal.

Facebook Post Boost

Like Instagram, Facebook Post Boost is a way for smaller brands and companies to slip through the cracks of corporate advertising and gain effective traction at a lower cost. In the coming year the dominant trend for corporate social media advertising is to run high cost campaigns with long run times, this opens up possibilities.

Facebook Post Boost has been introduced to combat the decline in organic reach for businesses on the site. In recent years Facebook has moved more towards posts from friends and family. The result of this is more competition with bigger brands for reaching your target audience. With Facebook Post boost you have an alternative to big budget advertising that still reaches the people who matter.

Facebook Post Boost allows you to set up parameters for a promotion post to reach your audience. You can select a range of demographics along with your ad duration and budget. These ads are not as straightforward as scheduling a campaign with a long run time but they are just as effective at reaching your audience and helping smaller businesses compete with the big guns.

Twitter Explore

In recent times Twitter has become less favorable to marketers and many are moving away from it, opting for Facebook and Instagram instead. The platform is generally perceived as good for marketing if you have a few major influences, but is otherwise difficult to reach your target audience effectively. As more small and medium sized businesses seek conversions elsewhere it might be time to move against the tide.

The reason for this trend is fairly obvious. While it is not impossible to gain new followers on Twitter and benefits from retweets, the platform doesn’t lend itself well to conversions – getting people off Twitter and onto your website is not as slick as other platforms. Still, the site has much to offer, especially if more of your competition is making the shift.

In 2021 it’s more than worth the effort to investigate your potential reach on Twitter. With less competition in your industry and some concerted effort promoting your brand with retweets, lists, and relevant connections, you might see some Twitter ROIs you have for some time relinquished.

People Per Hour

People Per Hour is an excellent freelancer website that connects talented freelancers with businesses and brands. There is so much on offer through this website that it would be silly to ignore the possibilities in 2021. For instance, you could hire influencers to visit your YouTube channel to build subscribers or have product reviews written.

Building a brand online is not always easy or straightforward. There are a concert of things to consider, everything from how to post content, where to post content, and what content to include. You might want written material or something more sophisticated like graphic or photographs. Whatever it is you ‘need’ to take your business forward online PPH has the freelancers to help.

Using freelancers might not be your first solution. It’s tempting to learn the tricks yourself and save the investment for other areas of the business. But realistically, a freelancer who spends all their time doing what you need done will turn around an effective product for you far more quickly. This saves you time and most likely money as well.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console might not be the most sophisticated analytics software on the market, but it is free and extremely useful – especially for small and medium sized businesses that need to know the vital stats for website traffic. The software does have its flaws – it is not quite as accurate as similar products – but it’s extremely user-friendly.

With Google Search Console you can analyse, maintain and improve your website’s position in SERPs, all from the convenience of a free easy to use software system. The Google Search Console allows you to confirm that Google can locate and crawl your website, fix any indexing problems you may have, analyse Google search traffic for your website, and much more.

There are some drawbacks to the Google Search Console. It works on a verified setting which means that only some activity is recorded. If someone searches for your website with a VPN or third party app it may not register. Still, it’s a small price to pay for a range of free features to help your business succeed.

Sprout Social

If you’ve already done the groundwork with your social media presence and need something to take your brand to the next level, Sprout Social is the tool to use in 2021. Sprout Social collects information from all your social media channels and helps you manage and engage with it efficiently – integrate your social media enterprise and forget about the hassle of sporadic emails.

When you’re running a social media enterprise you need to have updated responses to new messages and schedule content across your channels. Without a social media manager like Sprout Social you will be all fingers and thumbs. Needless to say this software is for the more advanced social media users. In order to collect data Sprout Social will need access to several channels and many followers.

Creative Ways to Market Your Business

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article, Creative Ways to Market Your BusinessWhen opening a business, the one thing that any budding entrepreneur wants is for it to be as successful as possible. Marketing your business to a wide variety of audiences and maximizing the number of people you will be reaching is undoubtedly one way of promoting success. However, as a business owner, you probably understand that the market is saturated with the traditional methods of branding and marketing a business. How can you beat your competitors and get to potential customers first, but vibrantly and innovatively? Fear not, for we have devised a great list of creative ways to market your business. Let your artistic flair go wild and read on for more!

Social Media

The top dog of marketing and branding in the present day! When you understand how to use social media to your advantage and its fullest extent, you are sure to be successful in your attempts. Everywhere you look, businesses are using social media as one of the main ways to connect with their audiences and truly allows you to be creative in what you post. Ensuring that the content is relevant to your services and products and linking to your website – if you have one – will make sure that those visiting your social media accounts go on to visit your website. Social media is also a great tool to use when promoting other marketing avenues that you might be using, leading us to our next suggestion.

Podcasts

Podcasts are certainly something that has increased in popularity in the last few years. There is no right or wrong way to record your own podcast. Knowing what you want to talk about on your podcast and how it will fill a gap in the market while linking to your business will encourage success. The only thing you would have to ensure is high-quality is the audio levels; no-one wants to listen to a podcast where they cannot hear what is being said! If you are interested in learning more about podcast production and how you can make it work for you, consider contacting companies like Jelly Marketing. Experts in all things related to podcast production, you are sure to be in the right hands here.

Using a Mural

Not the most convenient method of marketing, but one that has undoubtedly been successful for some businesses out there and is one way of letting your artistic flair free! Commissioning a mural near your business is sure to brighten your local area while promoting your business to potential customers. Something so bright will catch the attention of those who are passing, without you needing to say much. If you are contemplating using a mural for marketing purposes, make sure that it is short and snappy; you don’t want people to read into it too much. Murals also work well in tandem with social media; if someone has seen a vibrant and beautiful mural, they are likely to share it on social media. In turn, more people will see your mural and know about your business.

What’s more, when looking for other routes into marketing your brand, it is all about trying and testing the methods to see which one works best for you. Marketing and branding your business are not a one-size-fits-all; what might work for someone else is not guaranteed to work for you. Furthermore, you will want to relax! This is meant to be an exciting and creative time in your life. There is a suitable way of marketing out there for you; you just have to find what you like and what works first. There is no rush!

Why Backlinks Are Critical for Your Online Success

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article, Why Backlinks Are Critical for Your Online SuccessEach and every day, more people are creating websites for business and other purposes. The cyber-world is getting quite cluttered. It is more important than ever that your website is visible to interested eyeballs, But, how can you ensure that your site is even seen online at all?

One way to do so is by creating a strong backlink campaign when building out or revamping your website. Indeed, if you are serious about building a top-notch website, you may choose to work with a backlink service.

Website Backlinks: A Primer

To make matters as simple as possible, backlinks are hyperlinked connections from one website to another. A backlink, often just called a “link”, is an encoded pathway for one site to communicate electronically with another. You can think of them as roadways, using the transportation analog, or neural synapses, using the brain physiology model.

Links are easily seen on a webpage as a highlighted text string referred to as an “anchor text“. You can click on it and you will be quickly directed to another page on the web. It may be an internal link to another page on your site. But, in the case of a backlink, it will connect to another site in cyberspace.

Why Backlinks Are Important

High-quality backlinks make your site rank higher with the search engines like Google and Bing. Indeed, before your website site can rank, it needs links. The search engines use backlinks to “crawl” the web and make internet connectivity a reality. The better you help the engines with their operations, the better they will reward you.

Your reward comes in the form of high ranking on the search engine result pages (SERPs). You want to rank near the top for each of your keywords. Indeed, if you are not ranking in the top few pages, your site is essentially invisible.

Not all backlinks have an equal value to the search engines. Some are much more valuable than others. If you have a backlink to a popular, high-volume site, this will curry much more favor with Google than a link to a small site that is never seen. That is why high-quality links are of utmost importance.

If you have a site that has more than one page, be sure to practice deep linking. This is when you have backlinks not only to your homepage but to other pages on your site. For example, let’s say you have a site about coin collecting and you are in the business of buying and selling various coin types. You’ll certainly want links to your pages on dimes, quarters, and halves as well as your home page. Search engines love sites with deep linking and reward them with a higher ranking.

Why You May Need a Backlink Service

Hyperlinked connections from another website to yours can and do occur organically, but at first, the process can be excruciatingly slow. Because link building is so important in raising your site’s online visibility, it is often prudent to work with an SEO-savvy backlink service. A quality backlink service is up-to-date on the ever-changing SEO best practices. You want them working for you.

Tips for Finding the Best Backlink Service

These days, it seems like everybody and their brother has a shingle out on the web posing as SEO experts and site builders. The same is true in the areas of link building. Some of these are excellent firms, others are less scrupulous or savvy. How do you pick the best backlink-building service if you need one?

Here are several tips that will help you ferret-out the very best backlink service providers:

  • Will they evaluate your site content for quality as part of their service?
  • Will they assist you with internal link building as well as in the generation of quality external backlinks?
  • What do they know about SEO?
  • Can they provide a list of super-satisfied customers?
  • Are all costs and fees spelled out upfront?

The online world has become complex and busy. Quality backlinks will help your site will actually be seen.