Digital Marketing – PayU Blog https://payu.in/blog Thu, 23 Feb 2023 07:53:12 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 https://payu.in/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/favicon_index-1.png Digital Marketing – PayU Blog https://payu.in/blog 32 32 6 Simple Steps For A Successful Brand Building Process https://payu.in/blog/6-simple-steps-for-a-successful-brand-building-process/ https://payu.in/blog/6-simple-steps-for-a-successful-brand-building-process/#respond Fri, 28 Oct 2022 18:50:00 +0000 http://blog.payumoney.com/?p=1362 Think of a category and then think of a brand within it. What made you think of that brand? Is it an unmissable logo or a catchy slogan? Or is...

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Think of a category and then think of a brand within it. What made you think of that brand? Is it an unmissable logo or a catchy slogan? Or is it the unwavering quality of their offerings? Brand building involves different aspects of what your business stands for and promises to deliver. A strong brand identity helps you deeply connect with your audiences, create recall, and, thus, surpass the competition.

What is brand building?

How people perceive your business is your brand. The brand building process is about creating a unique image for your business. It starts with a strategy to define your brand’s relationship with its customers and how it will get there over time. A brand building strategy will help you be consistent in communication and experience across environments and assets, such as print and packaging, customer service, or social media.

6 Simple steps to build a successful brand

There are different ways you can build a strong brand. But here are six steps to get you started on a successful brand building journey:

Step 1: Determine Your Target Audience

The first thing you need to know when building a brand building strategy is your target audience. You can determine your audience based on age, location, interests, etc. This will help you define what you communicate, where, and how, so your audience can deeply relate to your brand. Depending on your target audience and their needs and aspirations, you can create a brand persona that resonates with them. Over time, your brand will need to evolve with your target audience to stay relevant.

  • Pro tip: Start with smaller, specific sets of target audiences. As your brand awareness and loyalty grow, you can expand your audience base to include more diverse groups.

Step 2: Define your brand mission

Your mission and vision statements describe why your brand exists and what it is passionate about. The brand mission is what you promise to do and how you will add value for your audience. It also dictates how you execute your brand strategy daily. It will guide your branding process across channels. All this should help you achieve your brand vision – what you want to be for your audience.

Step 3: Research your competition

Every brand has its unique selling point (USP). Analyze your competition and find out what works for them, what does not, and where your brand can do better than them. The brand building process should focus on that differentiating factor. This will help you define what can set your business apart and use it to your advantage in branding and marketing. Competitive analysis is a continuous process that helps you:

  • Define and refine your USP
  • Improve your products and services
  • Encourage research and development (R&D)
  • Benchmark your branding and pricing strategies
  • Identify business opportunities and threats

Step 4: Create a strong value proposition

You have studied your markets, competition, and audiences. Use this knowledge to clearly define what your brand offers and why your audiences should only choose you – what makes your brand unique and valuable. Include this value proposition in your marketing communication across channels to create a successful brand. For example, PayU’s scalable and robust platform makes it one of India’s best payment solutions providers.

Step 5: Set your brand markers and guidelines

Brand building is all about making your business recognizable and memorable. And it is done by playing on the human senses, particularly with visuals and sounds. Think Coca-Cola logo or Nokia jingle. Creating such unique and remarkable markers will create a special place for your brand in your audience’s minds. Once you have done that, document how your brand will be represented across channels. These guidelines will ensure consistency and quality.

Step 6: Market your brand

The last step is to tell the world about your brand! Set a definitive marketing strategy and create noise on channels your audiences frequent to grab their attention. Using your brand guidelines and marketing strategy, you can communicate with your audiences in relatable and engaging ways.

Apply your branding in every piece of communication, from packaging to stationary and website to marketing collateral. Identify new channels such as email, web, and affiliates to promote your brand.

Conclusion

Brand building is an ongoing process; you need to revisit it every now and then to ensure your branding is maintained consistently. The process requires expertise, and it is best to get professional help to get the best out of your efforts. You can learn more about branding in our blog on the importance of brand guidelines.

Frequently asked questions about the brand building process

What is brand building?

Brand building is creating awareness and promoting a business using different strategies and plans. In other words, it is building and displaying a brand identity through different campaigns such as on social media, websites, and events. Branding is essential for a company as it is what people see and think about it. It is your logo, tagline, ads, everything!

Helpful articles related to brand building:

Why is it important to build a brand?

Branding is important to build recognition and trust. This can help you acquire more customers and their loyalty over time.

How to plan a brand building process?

You can start with the six simple steps mentioned above to build a successful brand.

What is a brand roadmap?

A brand roadmap comprises concepts and strategies you can follow while building your brand. It includes goals, objectives, and ways to achieve them within set deadlines.

How can you build a strong brand?

We can build a strong brand with various methods and strategies. To start with, one needs to conduct a brand audit of the company. This includes a thorough competitive analysis and identifying your brand’s USPs. Make sure you are original and authentic across communications. Re-analyze your strategies regularly so you can maintain your brand identity.

How does advertising help in brand building?

The motive behind branding is to build recognition and attract more customers. Advertisement plays a great role here. It helps businesses remind their consumers of their presence. Advertisements help build brand salience. It reminds people of the product or services offered by a business by looking at its logo or advertising campaign.

What is brand reputation?

As the term suggests, brand reputation is how people see your brand. Do they see your brand as fun and quirky? Or do they see your brand as an authority in your industry? A good brand reputation means consumers trust you and like your offerings.

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A Quick Guide For Businesses to Optimize Twitter Adverts https://payu.in/blog/how-to-optimize-your-twitter-adverts/ https://payu.in/blog/how-to-optimize-your-twitter-adverts/#respond Thu, 28 Jan 2021 16:49:00 +0000 http://blog.payumoney.com/?p=1210 Twitter is one of the most relevant social media channels to generate leads and reach out to prospective audiences. It gives you an opportunity to brand your product to over...

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Twitter is one of the most relevant social media channels to generate leads and reach out to prospective audiences. It gives you an opportunity to brand your product to over 313 million active users. We already explained to you how to run twitter ads campaign and moving forward, let’s focus on optimization of Twitter Ads.

Optimization is critical for the success of your ad campaign. Optimizing twitter adverts help you control your Twitter Ads buck. Keep experimenting with several existing campaigns in order to understand targeting and creative types.

There are a few terms and processes which you need to be familiar with before starting twitter adverts optimization. Here’s what they include:

Impressions: It means the total number of times your ad has been shown.

Graph: Twitter Graph shows all the important statistics for your ad campaign.

Date Range: It provides a detailed view of the hourly breakdown.

Tweet Engagement: Number of times users engaged with your ad.

Twitter Cards: With this, you can add nice photos, videos, or any other media to your Tweets that can help you drive traffic to your website.

Conversions: Actions taken on your website by users. Action can be a sale or a lead.

Here are some of the best practices to help you optimize your Twitter advert campaigns in the best way:

InfoGraphic_Twitter_advt

Fine Tune Your Targeting

Targeting allows your online business to connect only with the intended users. We advise you to run multiple campaigns in order to optimize better. Use one type of targeting option with each campaign. You can target your campaign & create ads by user interest, behaviour, followers, keyword, and location. Each targeting option helps you identify relevant matrices that work for your online business.

Select 20 keywords and identify user engagement on each keyword. It will help you narrow down keywords that matter the most for your business & will help you get free twitter followers. Optimize location in case broad region doesn’t yield target audience. Narrow down to the specific areas in order to zero down geo patterns.

Refine Your Bidding & Twitter Advertising

Twitter adverts provide an “Automatic Bid” option that automatically optimizes your bid while keeping your budget intact. Automatic bidding is cost-efficient as you only pay for links clicked by users.

You can also use the “Targeting Bid” option. It allows you to fix the budget as per identified targeting matrices. Although it costs more you can reach the most intended user base. Try “Maximum Bid”, in case you want maximum exposure.

A/B Testing

In the overview section, you can quickly analyze which Twitter campaign is reaching the people effectively. Always aim for more than 1% engagement rate while defining benchmarks for your Twitter ads. If you are achieving lower than 1%, revise your copy and ad creative.

Ad engagement easily helps you identify which creative is performing better when the targeting is the same for multiple ads. Quickly go to “Edit Campaign” in order to edit copy or ad creative whenever required.

Use Conversion Tracking

Make sure you add a ‘conversion tag’ on your website. Double-check it and specify a key conversion tag for each campaign. It will help you to capture data in the most relevant format. Website tags let you choose whether you want to optimize your Twitter Advert for link clicks or website conversions.

For example, PayU with tags for Payment Gateway might specify the payment tag as the key conversion tag for a “Free Payment Gateway” promo campaign.

Device and Platform Targeting

Make sure you test your Twitter ad campaign for mobile and tablets. Check engagement rates across various devices as it will help you to identify the best performing device for your ad campaign. Make your ads more relative for mobile as users nowadays are interacting in real-time on their smartphones.

Twitter optimization is an ongoing process and the key to achieving maximum engagement is experimentation. Keep using the Twitter targeting option to filter your ad campaign. Also, read our blog on “How to optimize your Google adverts account”.

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What Does Social Media Trends 2020 Exactly Look Like? https://payu.in/blog/what-does-social-media-trends-2019-look-like/ https://payu.in/blog/what-does-social-media-trends-2019-look-like/#respond Thu, 31 Oct 2019 22:30:03 +0000 https://blog.payumoney.com/?p=4909 Across the globe, social media has seen a constant upsurge since about a decade. It has always been the hot topic and founders and the users, both have had several...

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Across the globe, social media has seen a constant upsurge since about a decade. It has always been the hot topic and founders and the users, both have had several experiments to make the best of it. Looking back, it is no wrong saying that the year 2018 has been a roller coaster for social media enthusiasts. While a number of new and exciting features were introduced, there were times when social media took a toll on its followers: downfall in organic reach, attack on an individuals’ privacy and a stiff competition! Tie your seatbelt to get acquainted with the social media trends for 2020!

social media trends 2020

Social Media Trends 2020: 7 Things To Look At

We have prepared a quick guide and thrown some light on social media trends 2020. This will help you make your brand stand out in the market!

1. Rebuilding Trust: Be Transparent

2020, in some ratio, was a roller-coaster ride for trust on social media. In recent months, users and media observers have raised questions on privacy, ethics, and accuracy. A recent study by a media giant says that 60% of people no longer trust social media.

So, what is the solution? Social media trends 2020 show that smart brands are focusing less on maximizing the following base and more on establishing transparency.

Here’s a list of quick do’s to combat this fight:

  • Create communities on social media
  • Share insightful and researched content
  • Incorporate filtered influencer marketing
  • Run contest and focus on user-generated content
  • Improve customer experience on different platforms
  • Align best resources for ORM

The motive should be to let your customers put their trust in you. The personification of your brand is the best thing to do to stay on top of your customers’ mind.

2. Effective Video Marketing

Research suggests that videos out-rule all the other form of content. There are various types of videos like a tutorial, testimonial, events, vlogs, demos etc.

Videos that show human figure and has a personal touch allow a company to put a face to the business. It enables prospects and customers to get to know who leads and works in a business. We have a detailed guide on Video Content Marketing: Top Trends Of 2018 that will give you 360-degree knowledge about video marketing tools and best practices.

When it comes to social media platforms, experiment and see which type of video works the best for your brand. Make sure the length of the video is within 3 minutes. That is the average watch time since social media platforms are scrolled by users on the go! Create a checklist as to which format works on which platform. For example, Instagram does on support GIF format. It also has limitations for videos that exceed one minute.

social media trends 2020

3. Using Paid Ads

The bitter fact is we are in the pay-to-play era on social media platforms. Marketers have realized that to be the best player, it is mandatory to increase social ad-budget. One in every four Facebook pages now uses paid media to achieve the end goal. Back in 2012, on average, a brand could reach out to 16% of the audience without spending a penny. Today, this number has come down to just 6%.

Here are some tips before you plan your ad-spends:

  • Understand and target the right audience
  • Experiment with different ad formats
  • Repurpose content from top performing organic content
  • Invest in quality rich content
  • Split test to analyze the performance

4. Experimenting Micro Influencer Marketing

In the past couple of years, social media influencers have become a major trend. There are Instagram stars, Twitter influencers, YouTube millionaires. These people have a huge following and a single post by them is instantly seen by hundreds of people. With an upsurge in the number of social media influencers, their prices have sky-rocketed. Hence, businesses are now in search of an alternative. This is where influencer marketing comes into the picture.

Who are micro-influencers?

As opposed to major influencers, micro influencers exist in every marketing strata. Unlike major influencers, they do not have a massive following. Usually, they have a following of about 10,000 followers but most of their followers are genuinely interested in what they have to say. The best part is that they are very engaged in what they do. Since they are not highly targeted by advertisers, they are trustworthy and down to earth. They hold a lot of marketing potential.

While you shortlist micro-influencers for your brand, make sure you pick up the accounts that are relevant to your business/ brand. Check their activity logs, interactions and have a quick verification (by verifying documentation, checking their collaborations etc.). Be aware of fraudulent cases and fake profiles!

https://youtu.be/8qJSfuSWOHU

5. Being Real Time

The near future of social media marketing is real-time marketing. Social media trends 2020 calls for 24/7 customer support, chatbots and social media monitoring in case of any social media crisis. This world where we live in now has no time to wait! Today, consumers want to be heard and get answers real-time. Not to mention, social media never sleeps. Consumers continue to use products, talk about them, and buy a new product anytime. To stay at par with this fast pacing world, we have automated tools that notifies when your brand is mentioned anywhere, can help you schedule your post anytime and generate an automatic reply. So even when you are sleeping, your social media isn’t.

Pro Tip: Twitter is the best platform when it comes to being a part of a real-time conversation. Keep a tap on your industry news and make sure you don’t miss out on getting your brand and your consumers engaged.

6. Making The Best Of Stories

Most of the social media today have enabled the stories feature. This is a feature that allows users to post photos and videos that stays on the profile for 24 hours. They are not only fun and creative, but they are also an awesome source to increase customer engagement, creating brand awareness and driving traffic to your website! Looking at the growing usage of social media on smartphones over a desktop, this feature of social media has a lot of hidden potentials.

Stories are visuals which are meant to be created and consumed on the go with nothing more than a smartphone and a creative eye! Since they are ephemeral, there’s more room for experimentation too! Stories feel immediate, real & personal.

To creative effective stories:

  • Do a competitor analysis
  • Understand your audience
  • Tell a ‘story’ and be authentic
  • Use effective CTAs
  • Get creative and provide value

social media trends 2020

7. Using Personalized Messaging

The trend suggests that, across the board, people are spending more time on messaging and less time sharing the news on social media platforms. This shift from public to private spaces is changing the expectations of customers. A recent survey suggests that 9 out of 10 customers prefer one on one conversation with their favorite brands. It further says that getting in touch with the company personally makes them feel confident about their brand.

Create automatic replies on your Facebook & Instagram page. Have an active ORM Team and keep them well-versed with your product/ services provided.

Pro-tip: With all the ease of technology, setup bots to assist a visitor on your social media platform. It is the best way to scale your customer service efforts and create a better experience.

It is no wrong in saying that social media is here to stay. Social media trends 2020, as projected hold a lot of potential if understood well. Proper planning, powerful strategies and best execution on social media platform can do miracles to a brand. Stick by the above-mentioned listicle to rock this year!

With all the marketing efforts for your business in place, it’s a good idea to have an all-in-one payment solution in place as well. Be a part of PayUmoney family to enjoy the best payment gateway experience. Grow your business effortlessly!

social media trends 2020

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Beginner’s Guide To Coupon Marketing Strategy https://payu.in/blog/beginners-guide-to-coupon-marketing-strategy/ https://payu.in/blog/beginners-guide-to-coupon-marketing-strategy/#respond Tue, 30 Apr 2019 04:48:15 +0000 https://blog.payumoney.com/?p=5719 Coupon marketing has become an integral part of any marketing strategy and it is no wrong in saying that coupons have already become a sophisticated marketing tool. It does not...

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Coupon marketing has become an integral part of any marketing strategy and it is no wrong in saying that coupons have already become a sophisticated marketing tool. It does not only drive sales but also helps in building brand image and customer loyalty. With all the marketing automation tools, a right coupon marketing strategy in place can also help you to create a relevant database. This blog will give you a detailed guide on how to create a coupon marketing strategy that will help you achieve your marketing goals easily!

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Coupon Marketing Strategy: Getting The Basics Right

Before we dive deep and understand the execution part of scaling marketing efforts through efficient coupon marketing, it is necessary to understand why you should choose coupon marketing. The top reasons for you to use coupon marketing for your business are:

  • Attracts New Customers & Generates Traffic: Coupons are one of the best ways to attract new customers. This can happen by social sharing, word of mouth and viral marketing.
  • Helps In Customer Retention Activities: It is necessary to invest some of your efforts in retaining the customers from which you have not heard in a while. Sending coupons to them via emails and SMS and calling them back to your business will ensure your business growth.
  • Builds Brand Loyalty: Building brand loyalty is one of the most important parts of growing business. Best coupon marketing has its top priority to build meaningful relations. Coupon marketing plays an important role in this process.
  • Gets Relevant Database: As mentioned earlier, there are certain tools which can be used efficiently to create a database which further can be used in your retargeting campaigns.
  • Increases The Sales Metrics: Every business has a set goal and at the end of the day, we all want to see the number going up. Coupons are provenly efficient to scale up your sales.
  • Easy Controlling & Tracking: With all the easy to use dashboards functionality, it is very easy to control and track the performance of your coupon marketing campaign. Basis the performances, you can decide to plan your next steps!

Read our blog on How Businesses Can Make It Big Using Coupon Marketing to get detailed guide on types of coupon marketing and the best platforms to choose from!

Coupon marketing strategy

How To Plan Your Coupon Marketing Strategy?

Now that you know why you should use coupon marketing, here is a 4-step guide to help you make the strategy to drive the best results:

1. Determining Your Target Audience

The first step is to understand who your target audience is. The success or failure of your coupon marketing strategy depends on how well it resonates with your target audience.

This means that before you plan on the ‘type’ and ‘platform’ for your coupon marketing, you need to ask questions like:

  • what is the age group that will be more open to coupons and offers?
  • is there any geographical area that will get the best ROI?
  • should the targeting be on the existing customers or bringing in the new customers?

…and so on.

If you plan to target the existing customers, have a detailed competitor analysis in place and go over and beyond what your competitors are doing. On the other hand, if you are looking to target existing customers, carefully analyze their buying patterns and past behaviors and come up with coupons that best matches their buying styles. Statistics show that over 80% of buyers switch brands if offered with better coupons and discounts.

Statistics show that over 80% of buyers switch brands if offered with better coupons and discounts.

Crocs: Coupon Marketing Strategy

Takeaway: Tailoring your coupon marketing strategy to suit the needs and buying habits of your target audience is the best way to boost your conversions instantly. Do not let your customers leave you after redeeming the coupons. Instead, keep retargeting them with follow up coupons!

2. Deciding What To ‘Offer’

Now that you understand your target audience, it’s time to decide what should you offer to them? The best thing to do is offering coupons based on their preferences and choices. This is a very important step while you plan your coupon marketing strategy because this one choice decides the overall success of the entire campaign.

The key is to be careful when selecting coupons for your campaign. Make sure the type of coupons you select are aligned with the buying habits of your target audience.

For example, choose a rupee-based value system if your buyer loves instant saving on the purchase. Or, if your buyer usually shops via a mobile device, send them text-based coupons! You can also choose to send digital coupons via email to the buyers who left on the checkout window.

Comeback: Coupon Marketing Strategy

Takeaway: Choosing the right combination and having a proper plan in place will help you leverage the entire ROI of the campaign!

3. Selecting The Right Platform

After knowing your target audience and deciding on what are you going to offer, the next and the most crucial step is to select the relevant platform. You must be wondering, what are the best places to host these offers to drive tons of sales ready leads? One of the answers is online coupon websites like couponduniya, groupon etc.

Remember, 96% of buyers visit coupon websites before making a purchase!

Other research also suggests that 71% of buyers follow brands on Social Media to stay up-to-date with their latest coupons. Another 58% prefers getting coupons via emails. So you know what are the best possible channels to make a way to knock on the doors of your customers!

Coupon Websites: Coupon marketing strategy

Takeaway: When people see coupons on social media, they tend to share the posts. This means free brand promotion, positive sentiments and awesome ROI for your business. Experiment on different platforms and see what works the best in favor of your brand!

4. Analysing The Performance Of Your Campaign

After all the research, planning and execution of your coupon marketing strategy, the last step is to track and measure the performance of the campaign. This will give you an insight if the campaign is working well and getting the desired result or not. And basis the metrics, you can plan to decide on the next steps.

If you provided a link to a landing page, then track the traffic by creating a trackable URL. Another essential step is to dive deeper and understand at which stage did your buyer consume the coupon or left the space. Monitor each step carefully and look for any number that will help you plan the best strategy for the next campaign.

Takeaway: Never work on assumptions when it comes to data. Make a habit of tracking and controlling your campaign from time to time to optimize it the best way! This goes a long way to maintain a healthy coupon marketing strategy.

Planning a coupon marketing strategy is much more than just designing an attractive coupon for your business. It requires a detailed comprehensive management system and that develops overtime. Be ready to offer omni channel experience and build personalized relationships with your customers/ buyers. The numbers and graph for the coupon marketing is only going to soar high. By incorporating the above-mentioned steps in your coupon marketing strategy, you are all set to execute a successful campaign!

With all your marketing efforts for your business in place, it’s a good idea to have an all-in-one payment solution in place as well. Sign up with PayUmoney to enjoy the best payment gateway experience and grow your business effortlessly!

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5 Content Marketing Trends You Should Test in 2020 https://payu.in/blog/5-content-marketing-trends-you-should-test-in-2017/ https://payu.in/blog/5-content-marketing-trends-you-should-test-in-2017/#respond Tue, 16 Apr 2019 17:37:16 +0000 http://blog.payumoney.com/?p=1457 Content is king when it comes to market your brand’s products or services across the channels. It continues to be an important parameter to scale reach, visibility and brand awareness....

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Content is king when it comes to market your brand’s products or services across the channels. It continues to be an important parameter to scale reach, visibility and brand awareness. Your online business needs to deliver content in the most relevant way to reach out to new audience and groom the existing base. It helps your online business to drive sales and engage users.

Although content marketing is changing and evolving in many ways it interacts with the user, it is still the most relevant driving engine for Search Engine Optimization and Google Algorithms.

After working for a numerous years in the field of content marketing, I’ve immersed in the issue of latest content marketing trends. I have gathered my unique perspective to highlight the trends which you should definitely test in your content marketing efforts to gain desired results.

Here are few content marketing trends that will definitely change the way marketers prepare their content marketing strategy:

Content Marketing Trends for 2020

1. Year Strategy

Formal and organized content marketing strategy will replace a tertiary content. As I’ve grown in the content marketing efforts, I’ve concluded that a formal 12 month or a year strategy will document your content marketing plans in a more responsible manner. It includes the topics, themes, vision, audience and your business objective.

“A year strategy in your content marketing efforts can help you increase the amount of content you produce without compromising the quality”

Don’t forget to include all the basic necessities while planning your strategy. You need to cover every single perspective about why and how you are going to market your content. Go back to your analytical data and compare your efforts with the strategy you implemented in the past.

2. Increase Relevant Content

The amount of audience seeking relevant content is increasing every single day. Users are now consuming content which caters to their needs in the best possible manner. Many reports have suggested that numerous businesses are going to invest their efforts in marketing their content across various platforms.

This suggest that you need to activate every relevant channels where you can engage with your audience. It includes activating your own company blog just like PayU Blog. Keep your content relevant by continuing to publish key topics discussed by your users.

3. Value Preposition

Your value proposition is the unique selling preposition which your product or service market to its prospect audience. It is one of the single most important element which differentiate your online business from the rest. Clearly communicate what experience your brand offer for each product or service.

You must clearly propagate the purpose behind your product or service and how it benefits your users. Tell consumers how you solve their problem and what makes your online business unique and valuable.

Define below elements for your content marketing team so that it can generate value prepositions in the best possible way:

  • Business Goals
  • Target Audience
  • Audience Needs

4. Video Content

We all know that videos continue to dominate online search queries. Therefore, it is quite important for you to start purposing your content into videos. Video marketing engages your user in a more efficient way than articles or blogs. Adding a video on your website definitely increases your conversion rate.

Video content also strengthens trust and creates long term relationship with the users interacting with your online business. Video increases the time spent by visitors on your site, thereby boosting your site’s performance in the eye of Google. You are likely to rank high on search engines if you have embedded a video in your landing page.

5. Increased Mailer Content

Email marketing still is the most consumed content marketing platform by consumers across the globe. It is easy to access and allows your online business to a niche target audience base. Email marketing is a great way to market your content in year 2020. Refine your email list in order to make it more targeted. Consider testing your subject lines to increase your open rates.

When it comes to conversion, there is no more powerful platform than email. Average click-through-rate of email is around 2% whereas average click-through-rate from a tweet is around 0.5%.  This makes email 6x times more efficient medium to interact with the audience base.

As we have witnessed content marketing over the years, 2020 definitely promises exciting times. Above trends will definitely add depth to your content marketing initiatives and the experience you incorporate to keep your users engaged.

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How To Write A Blog: 7 Steps To Get Started! https://payu.in/blog/how-to-write-a-blog-that-gets-maximum-eyeballs/ https://payu.in/blog/how-to-write-a-blog-that-gets-maximum-eyeballs/#respond Tue, 22 Jan 2019 06:30:31 +0000 https://blog.payumoney.com/?p=4928 Blogging is a crucial and an inseparable element of a successful content marketing strategy. In its literal sense, ‘blog’ is a short form for ‘web log’. The beginning of blogs...

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Blogging is a crucial and an inseparable element of a successful content marketing strategy. In its literal sense, ‘blog’ is a short form for ‘web log’. The beginning of blogs can be traced down to early 1990s when individuals started publishing thoughts and stories on their website. Further, they used to share these blogs with like interest groups. They were limited to personal use. Today, blogging has evolved drastically. People and organizations from all walks of life, manage blogs to share their experience, insights, analysis, and criticisms in a domain they excel. Blogging holds a lot of potentials if done the right way! Read this blog to uncover your quest of how to write a blog that gets you the best results.

How to write a blog for businesses

How To Write A Blog: 7 Steps To Master The Art

It is no wrong in saying that blogging is an art. It is an art of persuasion and sharing knowledge. You must have heard how blogging is one of the most successful marketing ways. But before you get started, it is important to learn how to write a blog. Here’s a quick guide to keep you at peace when you get started!

1. Understand Your Audience

Before you start writing your first post, have a clear understanding of your target audience. Find out what they want to learn. Understand their areas of interests. Analyze their online behavior (active platforms and hour of the day). Create a buyer persona. A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer/reader.

The idea is simple: to understand your readers’ need. For instance, if your readers are enterprise businesses, you don’t need to provide them with information about how to get started on social media. They already know that. What you need to talk is how to shift from the formal & standard way to more casual and personal approach. This type of tweak is what will separate your blogging from the generic blogs.

2. Create Your Domain

After you have a clear understanding of who are you going to talk to, the next step is to find a place where you will host each of your blog posts. This requires choosing a Content Management System (CMS) and a website domain hosting service. There are several CMS providers in the market. If you wish to start a blog independently, we recommend choosing WordPress. Sign up on WordPress and select free/paid plans and get started.

If you own a company and wish to get started with a blog for the same, you can do that by creating a subdomain that lives within your company’s domain. Some of the best web hosting service providers are:

  • GoDaddy
  • HostGator
  • DreamHost
  • BlueHost

Pro Tip: Before choosing a domain, make sure it does not exist on internet. Keep the domain catchy, self-explanatory and easy to remember!

3. Customize Your Blog’s Theme

Ones you have your blog domain set up, work on the appearance to reflect the purpose of your blog. For instance, if you are starting a blog for environmental sustainability, green must be a good color because it is usually associated with the conservation of nature. On the other hand, if you are at a stage when you are thinking of how to start a blog for your automobiles business, incorporate images of vintage cars and let the appearance do the talking!

Here are other things you must update right away:

  • Logo: Add a high-resolution image of your brand logo and allow people to recognize you on the go!
  • ‘About’ Page: Create a quick mission statement and let people know the purpose of your blog
  • Contact Details: While you are halfway through establishing your blog, invite people to connect with you via emails or social media

4. Choose Your First Blog Topic

Before you even start writing, you need to pick a topic for your blog post. The best practice is to start with the basics. Identify the pain pointers your target audience must be facing and kick-off a conversation. If you are a service provider (like a banking app), create quick how-to guides that will assist your readers on the go.

Throw some light on the marketing trends. If ‘how to start a blog that beats the competitors’, is your question, the power lies in staying up to date and provide your readers with relevant knowledge. Most of the successful blogging sites plan a blog calendar for a quarter with a cluster topic approach. This approach refers to a way where you select one major topic (pillar blog) and write about it. This is followed by creating multiple supporting blogs about the same topic. This is one of the most important steps when you are starting off with your blog.

5. Create Your Blog

Ones you finalize your blog topic, start creating the first draft for your blog. The structure for all your individual should be consistent. The best way to structure your blog is to follow this rulebook:

How To Write A Blog: Beginner’s Guide

  • Catchy Title: This is the first thing your reader will see. Make sure it is interesting. Keep it SEO optimized and catchy to read!
  • Appropriate Images: Use self-explanatory cover image. You can experiment with GIFs too. Add images within the blogs. These can be an infographic, Graphical representation and so on. Remember, 75% of the marketers who use images in their blogs have better success metrics.
  • Quick Introduction: Start with an introductory paragraph. Do not keep it too long but be clear with your topic. Let your readers know the gist of what they are going to read.
  • Talking Points: Create a quick bullet list and introduce your readers with the major points covered in your blog.
  • Main Body: Even though making the content SEO optimized is a must, make sure you don’t do keyword stuffing. Conduct proper research and produce quality rich content.
  • Brief Conclusion: By the end of your blog post, give your reader a quick walkthrough of what was the takeaway. Connect all the dots and navigate them to other blogs.
  • Invite Feedback: Know that each reader you get is an asset. After they have read your blog, invite them to share their feedback, recommendations, and suggestions.
  • Related Posts & Shareables: Give links to more of your relevant blog posts and be open to social media sharing. This will directly increase your traffic! Do not forget to add appropriate call-to-action (CTA). This can be ‘Sign Up’, ‘Login’ ‘Buy Now’, ‘Subscribe’ etc.

How To Write A Blog

6. Stick By The Checklist

Blogging is not just about writing a content piece and publishing it. There are various things apart from the main content. These includes:

  • SEO Optimization: Tools like Keyword Planner have made the life of a blogger easier. After you have the first draft of your blog, look for the points where inserting your targeted keyword makes sense. Remember, Google is smart! Do not stuff your blog with keywords.
  • Meta Description: Meta description are the descriptions that are shown below the title on your Google search page. They provide the searcher with a short summary of the entire post. Usually, the character limit is 150-160 words here. Make sure to make these descriptions actionable.
  • Anchor Text: Anchor text is the word/ words that link to another page; either on your website or another website. Search engines takes anchor text as an important consideration when ranking your page for a certain keyword. Make sure you edit the anchor text carefully.
  • Mobile Optimization: With the domination of mobile devices users, it is important to have a responsive website. In other words, having an interface that is designed for mobile has become a crucial part.
  • Alternate Text: Search engines count on an alternate text as another important variable! Alternate text refers to the SEO optimization for your images. Make it a point to optimize your images so that you do not miss out on ranking on search engines!

7. Be Consistent!

Now that you are almost there, the key is in being consistent. Prepare a calendar and stick by it. Create a community of your readers and send them timely emails and newsletters. Another way to stay connected is to go for offline events. One on one conversation always gets the best results. Establish a connect with your audience and keep calling them back.
Create a mood board for your brand. A mood board is a type of collage consisting of images, texts and samples of object in a composition. To make it simple, create a brand guideline and stick by it.

At last, when these your basics are in place and you have a few blogs with you, start keeping a track of your blogs’ performance. Analyze what type of content works the best and plan your strategy accordingly. Blog performance: Measuring It The Right Way gives you an insight on how to measure your performance. Repurpose your blogs to different formats and share it across platforms to reach out to the maximum number of people.

These are the basics of getting started with your blog. In a world where millions of content pieces are uploaded daily, it is difficult and an important thing to make your content stand out. Blogging has come a long way from where it started. The advent of CRM, writing assistant tools and search engines have made the knowledge sharing platform a tough competition. How to write a blog is no more going to be a tedious task if you stick by these 7 points and execute them the best way!

With all the marketing efforts for your business in place, it’s a good idea to have an all-in-one payment solution in place as well. Be a part of PayUmoney family to enjoy the best payment gateway experience. Grow your business effortlessly!

How to write a blog for businesses

Recommended Reads:

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12 Must-Use Instagram Business Tools In 2019 https://payu.in/blog/instagram-business-tools-2019/ https://payu.in/blog/instagram-business-tools-2019/#respond Thu, 03 Jan 2019 13:23:22 +0000 https://blog.payumoney.com/?p=4894 Yes, Instagram is one of the top 5 apps globally. Yes, marketers are gorging over the most ‘engagement-oriented’ app for promotions. Yes, there are millions of Instagram business tools out...

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Yes, Instagram is one of the top 5 apps globally.

Yes, marketers are gorging over the most ‘engagement-oriented’ app for promotions.

Yes, there are millions of Instagram business tools out there.

Yes, you are in the right space, because you want make the best use of Instagram business!

instagram business tools 2019

With your Instagram marketing in place, we now bring yet another most searched topic: using Instagram business tools for marketing.

Today, using Instagram for personal account is pretty easy and quick as compared to the business account. Are you facing the same issue? Don’t worry! We are here to help you choose exceptionally intelligent Instagram business tools for your business.

12 Must-Use Instagram Business Tools For Marketers

To begin with, there three important elements of Instagram:

  • Profile Bio
  • Pictures
  • Hashtags

Trust us, once you get these 3 points correctly, no one can stop your business from ruling Instagram.

We have listed the top Instagram business tools to assist you with content creation, editing, scheduling, analysing and much more! These tools are segmented into 6 use cases for your convenience:

top instagram business tools 2019

1. To Click & Edit Pictures Like a Pro

Instagram is a visual medium. What appeals to the eyes is consumed rather sold instantly. Hence, putting up good product or service pictures on your Instagram is of utmost importance.

If you skim through Google Play or App Store, you’ll find a bunch of apps promising best quality pictures. But which ones you should opt for your business undoubtedly:

  • VSCO: This app is used by leading marketing firms and influencers. The fun, professional and unique effects or filters it enables. Their photography app is one of the most powerful in the market.
  • Snapseed: This app is of great value and importance if you are always on the run. It is easy, simple and creative for candid clicks

Both these tools are mobile based applications and have free as well as paid services.

2. To Create Exceptional Content

Now that you have clicked pictures and edited them well, it’s time to make amazing post or content. The 2 most feasible tools include:

  • Canva: It is a free, handy and easy to use application (mobile + web). It has thousands of customisable templates and lakhs of stock images of your choice. Choose the best ones for your business and publish undeniable content. You can also create amazing Instagram stories on Canva!
  • Repost: It is not necessary to create original content at all times. You can also “repost” someone else inspiring and top performing post on your handle via the Repost app. This will help you boost your Instagram engagement and followers as well. Instead of creating content leverage what’s already existing because, it will always benefit you.

3. To Run & Evaluate Contests

In order to keep your audiences engaged at all times contests are always enduring. Instagram is a very hyper active social media channel, hence to keep your life sorted, you can make use of:

  • Wishpond: The app supports photo and hashtag (#) contests on Instagram. You can also use the app to creatively design contest landing pages, highlight prizes, approve and deny entries and so on. The app has a 14-day free trial eligibility after which, it is chargeable.
  • Comment Picker: If your contest is about asking people to comment in order to win prizes then, this is the apt tool to use. It randomly picks comments and your winner is selected! So, no need to spend hours evaluating comments.

4. For Competitor Analysis & Scouting Influencers

Competitor analysis is an integral part of any business hosted on any platform. Hence it is essential be on the top of your game. Hunt the top-rated influencers that suit your business perfectly. To perform this activity efficiently, you can make use of:

  • Buzzsumo: Influencer marketing is a powerful way to reach target audience without pinning hopes on paid media. Buzzsumo tool enables you to find, evaluate and analyse Influencer outreach for laying better business strategy.
  • HypeAuditor: The tool makes use of advanced AI to analyse any Instagram account on the basis of true followers, demographics, etc. This is a good way to keep an eye on your competitor!

5. To UseTheTrending Hashtags Of All Times

  • Focalmark: It is an intelligent tool designed specially for finding hashtags relevant on Instagram. It uses human research and ranking algorithm to suggest apt hashtag for your brand.
  • Autohash: This particular tool smartly makes use of computer vision algorithm to suggest hashtags relevant to your pictures

6. To Schedule Posts

This is one thing every marketer looks for – how to schedule posts on Instagram? Well, the answer is right here. Leave all your worries at bay and handle your business or ‘vacay’ peacefully with these tools at your disposal:

  • Later: This is an epic tool! It not only schedules your Instagram posts but also auto posts them at the set time. Later is also epic because of the acute analysis it provides for your posts. You can auto post videos as well using Later.
  • Preview: Want hashtag suggestions along with the ease to auto post on Instagram? Preview is the app for you. Create your Hashtag groups, discover and schedule the best time to post for your audience and much more on this app. Preview is available on android in select countries only, whereas it is easily available on iPhone globally.

These 12 Instagram business tools may seem quiet over the top or at first. You might think they require too much prep, but to be honest, it will make your life much breezy.

Keep Instagram post sharing on other social media channels ‘on’ for optimal results. So, before you resume your Instagram marketing activities, do check these Instagram business tools to grow quickly on social media.

With all your marketing efforts for your business in place, it’s a good idea to have an all-in-one payment solution in place as well. Now to enjoy the best payment gateway experience and grow your business effortlessly!

Recommended Reads

Benefits of Instagram business

Expert’s Guide To Instagram Content Strategy

How to promote business & drive sales on Instagram

Instagram marketing strategies

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Grow Your Startup By Effective Community Marketing https://payu.in/blog/grow-your-startup-by-effective-community-marketing/ https://payu.in/blog/grow-your-startup-by-effective-community-marketing/#respond Wed, 19 Dec 2018 22:15:09 +0000 https://blog.payumoney.com/?p=4842 Right from payments to marketing we, at PayUmoney, guide businesses with curated trends, tips, tricks and suggestions to grow. We love it when other experts find value in our content...

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Right from payments to marketing we, at PayUmoney, guide businesses with curated trends, tips, tricks and suggestions to grow. We love it when other experts find value in our content and volunteer to share their experience and knowledge with us. Praveen Dorna is one such expert who excels profoundly in building startup ecosystems in India and much more. In his debut guest post on PayUmoney blog, Praveen draws closure on how community marketing is done rightly can help businesses, especially startups, grow effortlessly in a short time span. Let’s hear it from the master himself!

From Praveen’s trunk of expertise….

Are you a startup owner? Then you would agree with us on: building startups is no cakewalk. In fact, the bitter fact is, more than 90% of the startups fail! Community marketing can be a savior here, but first, let’s zero down on a reason behind this failure.

  1. Waiting for the product to be entirely built and then going ahead with the marketing effort is where most of the founders feel the hit
  2. As per a study, the top reason why startups don’t succeed is no market need or building something that nobody wants

The transition from reason 1 to 2 is painful because realizing that the product you built so beautifully is not actually needed in the market firstly!

It is never too late to turn the tables around if you really believe in your product or service. Let’s get a deep look at how community marketing can help in leveraging the growth of your startup.Mitigating the risk of failure calls for co-creating your product with your customer!

However, building customers alongside could be challenging as there are a lot of internal biases that cloud the founders’ judgment. So how do we get there? How can each startup have a community that supports them along the journey and ends up being customers?

Here are the 7 community marketing steps that will help you build and manage a wonderful community. Let’s get started.

Step 1: Start With Community Marketing

Verbatim: ‘Community’ is a homogenous set of people with similar interests.

It is very important to identify the relevant community that can add value to your startup.

Firstly, define and identify your customer segment that your startup is targeting. Picking the wrong segment or allowing everyone into the community might dilute the purpose of community marketing.

Understanding the customer is a key part of this exercise. It will help you to define a good engagement strategy. In the long run, making your customers feel involved in the community that you are building.

Step 2: Choose The Right Platform

Once you know your customer segment, it’s time to pick the right platform to run your community. These platforms can range from WhatsApp, Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups to Slack, Disqus, Ning, Meetup.com, startupbyte.com.

The key here is to understand what kind of platform your customers are most active on so that you can reach out to them easily and make the best of community marketing.

Pro-tip: It’s a good practice to analyze various platform to see on how you can scale the community for future purposes and pick the right tool.

Step 3: Build A community

Once the above 2 steps are in place, here’s what you have to do next:

  • Understand the purpose of the community that you are building
  • Put together some key ground rules and best practices around running and managing your community

Assume that you are in the early stage of your startup and you are interested in building a community to co-create your product.

Community marketing rules
Source: Reddit (As an example)

The thumb rule to onboard any new customer is to streamline the onboarding flow and create a set of rules. Make sure that every community member receives the same kind of experience and treatment. It is important that anyone coming onboard is clear of the purpose so that there is no misalignment in expectations.

Step 4: Define Engagement Strategy

Before kicking off the operations it’s important to build a solid engagement strategy.

What is an ‘Engagement Strategy’? It is a detailed guide that you, your team or the moderators will use as a reference to continually engage with the community. This helps in keeping the experience of the community kept intact as you scale.

To make it easy, let us use an example. Imagine you are building a startup that helps Pregnant Mothers. Here your engagement strategy will outline:

  • how will you keep the pregnant mothers actively involved with you?
  • your product development phases for active feedback
  • your efforts to acquire them as your customer

At a broader level, you can use the framework of Pirate Metrics mentioned below:

  1. Acquisition- how do you go about acquiring your users
  2. Activation- what is your engagement strategy
  3. Retention- maintaining consistency in communication
  4. Referral- prompt your community members to invite their contacts
  5. Revenue- ways to convert your community members into buyers

Community Marketing Inforgraphic

Step 5: Acquire The Community

Now that you are half way there, start acquiring the community. Align them on the purpose of the community and allow them to have a sense of belongingness. This will help the community members feel better involved. Simple things such as introducing the community members on an ongoing basis goes a long way!

Pro tip: If you see some of the members evolving as community marketing leaders who want to contribute in the development, do not hesitate to ask them to take ownership of some of the engagement activities.

Use the right combination of online & offline channels to market your community. Ask for references and steadily start building the community. Few words of caution include:

  • Avoid building the community in an aggressive way in terms of member growth
  • Design criterion for ‘who’ can be a part of your community

This might lead to turning down a few members but that’s the right to maintain the sanity of the group.

It is very important that in the first few months, the community should be relatively slower in growth and should feel tight-knit. This helps in establishing a wonderful culture for the rest of the community to follow.

Step 6: Engaging Community

At a tactical level, community marketing is a lot about building healthy relationships with your members and making them feel that they are part of a community. Some of the best engagement tactics are:

  • Onboard Members: Get in touch with the members joining the community, get their profiles updated, ask them to introduce in the group, and understand their needs better.
  • Stimulate Discussions: Share 2-3 posts every day (on your social media channels) in order to help the community with relevant information. Ask questions and understand their problems. Share about your product from time to time, take their feedback and show progress.

Community marketing channels
Source: Reddit (As an example)

  • Encourage Participation: Invite members to post their thoughts, challenges, knowledge resources, expertise etc. so that members start feeling comfortable about participating in the group. It is important to moderate the posts so that they don’t become pure marketing channels with irrelevant info.
  • Engagement Activities: Plan and execute various online and offline activities. These can include online AMA (ask me anything sessions), webinars, mini-meetups, product demos etc. Offline events, both professional and social in nature to keeps the community engaged and enhance the bonding among community members.
  • Take Feedback: Ask your members for feedback from time to time and use metrics to measure engagement to understand the health of the community. It’s important to act on feedback so that the community feels that their opinion matters.

Step 7: Weaving your startup around Community

The key element that you need to understand is that the community now trusts ‘you’ more than the product. Hence, they will be more supportive and responsive to you in the journey of building your startup.

Some of the ways in which you can blend your startup phases in the community are :

Ideation Stage

At this stage, work on understanding the what the actual challenges are and how you’ll tackle them. Some most productive ways of doing so include:

a) Be adamant and keep asking questions to keep the community buzzing, lively and interactive.

b) Put forth discussions that can help drive valuable insights

Validation Stage

Here work towards prototypes and validating your idea by:

a) Using the community as a source of feedback.

b) Illustrating product demos with those who are interested to give feedback.

c) Also, plan for offline meetups to source feedback over a coffee/brunch.

d) Lastly, ask for help in the community networks wherever you are stuck.

Early Stage

Once you reach this stage, you have the product in place and are looking at more targeted feedback as well as initial customer base. Try:

a) Giving special deals to your community to make them feel valued and empowered

b) Ask for references who can assist you to get your startup to acquire the initial traction and revenues. Read our blog on 7 Quick Steps On Product Pricing.

Growth Stage

By this stage, your community will be decent sized.

a) Build a lot of community leaders across locations that you are targeting, so that they start working towards building micro-communities for you.

b) ProductHunt, GrowthHackers, Xiaomi and OnePlus are some of the great examples of leveraging powerful community marketing.

These 7 steps should help you understand how to go about leveraging the power of communities and community marketing for your startup journey. The effort will be totally worth it if done well! A special note, it is always recommended to do deeper research to reap bigger benefits.

The above knowledge, tips, and personal experiences belong solely to Praveen Dorna of StartupByte. If you would like to write a blog for PayUmoney as a guest please do get in touch with us: marketing@payu.in

With all your marketing efforts for your business in place, it’s a good idea to have an all-in-one payment solution in place as well. Choose the best payment gateway and grow your business effortlessly!

community marketing

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7 Blockbuster Digital Marketing Trends To Watch Out In 2019 https://payu.in/blog/digital-marketing-trends-2019/ https://payu.in/blog/digital-marketing-trends-2019/#respond Wed, 05 Dec 2018 12:30:51 +0000 https://blog.payumoney.com/?p=4751 2018 is not yet over, but the pun is 2019 is not far either! As a marketer or business owner we are pre-fixed with the idea of plotting the planning...

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2018 is not yet over, but the pun is 2019 is not far either! As a marketer or business owner we are pre-fixed with the idea of plotting the planning process away ahead of time. Digital marketing trends may seem similar from the bird’s eye view. But the moment you zoom in, you’ll see millions of minute yet impactful channels and courses brimming as trends each day.

In this extensive write up we will emphasize deeply on the digital marketing trends that 2019 beholds for small sized businesses specifically. We will also shine light on some vital apps, techniques and tools you have to possess in order to excel in these trends.

signup on payumoney

Let’s understand the digital marketing trends of 2019 right here and now!

1. SEO

Search Engine Optimization. By the time to read each syllable of S-E-O you might feel like skipping this article, but wait a minute.

2018 might have been a great SEO teacher for you, but there is one thing you must be still unknown to about SEO: Smart Magnet Method (SMM).

The SMM method takes your efforts to hunt for a long tail keyword away and gently replaces it with a smart method to use keywords from Google ads itself!

This method pulls all the chances of going wrong with your keywords and hence ranking. Here’s a simple example of how SMM works:

I write blogs for PayUmoney. Depending on my blog topic of the week, I’ll use SMM as described in the steps below:

  1. Go to the incognito mode of my browser.
  2. Type my intended search topic. Eg: best payment gateway
  3. I am sure the top searches that Google or search engines will reflect will be an “ad”
  4. I’ll choose the most common word used in these ads
  5. I will use this keyword to write my highly optimised blog. And I am done!

Apart from smart magnetic method there a couple of more SEO best practices that will definitely and actively breathe through the next 3 years! Check out these best practices for SEO right away.

To keep your SEO in place at all times tools such as Semrush, Grammarly and Uber Suggest or Google Keyword planner are of great advantage here.

2. Artificial Intelligence

“Ok Google call Mom”

“Siri what to do, I am bored!”

“ Alexa play a happy song”

“Your order is on its way, please be patient” and so many more auto (chatbots) and voice messages are doing your work for you.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are the gen next technologies the world is eyeing keenly.

AI is not only about chatbots and voice messages, it is deeply involved with automation. Today AI is heavily used in marketing as well.

Before you can directly reach out to an Amazon customer care executive, you will interact with a robot. The same process is being used by most of the large and small businesses as well.

AI makes work easy and faster for humans. Here are some really benchmarked AI tools for businesses you can have a look at and implement as well.

3. Mobile Marketing

“If your plans don’t include mobile, your plans are not finished” – Wendy Clark, Coca-Cola

The legends describe Mobile as the TV of the new era. Today, 80% of internet users own a smartphone. Mobile internet traffic as share of total global online traffic is 48.2%.

digital marketing trends 2019Image Source: Statista

In-app notifications, push notifications, mobile adverts, pop ups and many more ways of marketing tactics marketers are barging on at present. Everything that was once done on desktop only is now migrated to a 6-7 inch handset.

In this age of digitalisation, mobile marketing is proving to be a disruption when it comes to the way people are dealing with brands. Hence, planning your mobile marketing strategy in a very precise and step-by-step format is the need of the hour!

Some really handy tools for marketing efficiently on mobile include Clevertap, AdMob, your favorite social media.

4. Video Marketing

Videos are quick to view, easy to understand and creative to visualize.

Though video marketing has been a game spinner time and again, it is gaining deserving impetus only now!

video marketing digital marketing trends 2019

Digital marketing trends of 2019 are incomplete without mentioning video marketing as a crucial game changer in any marketing strategy. As a live example, we started gaining 3X more signups and blog views after we started creating and distributing videos.

Explore the top trends of video content marketing

Social media is a great channel of video content virality. You can find a variety of video creation tools online some of them include Powtoons, Animoto and a simple iMovies can get your traffic soaring high!

5. Influencer Marketing

Influencers not only influence but scoot your brand with their presence 10 notches higher! Whether you are a fashion or a hi-tech brand, you’ll find influencer in every business domain you are in.

A recent report points out to the fact that over 1,800 million people are actively using social media at present. As a business you must use influencer marketing which can prove to a be channel of hyper targeting your audience.

Chance upon a good way to gain quick insights into effective influencer marketing for fruitful results in a matter of time.

There are a few ways which can help you to search for quality influencers online. These tools include Cision, Buzzsumo and Onalytica.

6. Community Marketing

Quora, Reddit, StartupByte, Facebook and the likes are your goldmines! These communities with like mind people and interests are the place where you will be easily able to reach out to your core target audiences.

Post all important and vital content on these communities to reach out to many and more many people all at one go. Community marketing technically means you just sit at one place, for an hour and engage with the entire world all at once.

Create a community where people love to see what’s next coming up from your end. Keep your community filled with diverse content and always buzzing for more engagement.

7. Lead Generation

Today, almost all the websites you visit will either have a pop asking your name and email the moment you land on their site OR will have an exit intent luring you to stay and buy their product. What is this called?

Lead generation maybe irritating at first, but when you dive deeper into it, you’ll see the importance it withholds. Lead generation is a very important digital marketing segment. This is because of the after lead capturing scope it possesses.

Beginner’s guide to B2B lead generation is here!

Lead generation, capturing, nurturing and converting is a complete process by itself. Once you capture the desired leads, the way to nurture them to have them use your product in the end, is subjective on intent by nature.

For example, if you visit PayUmoney blog homepage, you’ll see a concise form which asks for your email. That’s it. Once you fill your details there, we nurture you with useful and customised content which will help you and your online business prosper.

lead generation digital marketing trends

Here our intent is to feed you healthy and customised content which is relevant to your business. However, your intent or aim of lead generation maybe different. Whatever your intent maybe, keep the motto “less is more” in mind and proceed towards success.

Apart from the above mentioned digital marketing trends, social media too plays an important role. We feel that social media is a given, now is the time for businesses to look forward to new avenues of marketing business in 2019. This new year onwards reach new heights and levels of successful with the 7 digital marketing tends of 2019 and let us hear your success!

With all your marketing efforts for your business in place, it’s a good idea to have an all-in-one payment solution in place as well. Now to enjoy the best payment gateway experience and grow your business effortlessly!
signup on payumoney

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StartingUp With Customer Retention Strategies https://payu.in/blog/customer-retention-strategies/ https://payu.in/blog/customer-retention-strategies/#comments Tue, 13 Nov 2018 11:30:13 +0000 https://blog.payumoney.com/?p=4694 PayUmoney blog is a place where all businesses can find everything they need to level up their business to the most optimal level. Be it payments or marketing we guide...

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PayUmoney blog is a place where all businesses can find everything they need to level up their business to the most optimal level. Be it payments or marketing we guide with curated trends, tips, tricks and suggestions to grow. We love when other experts find value in our content and volunteer to share their experience and knowledge with us. Saurabh is one such customer retention expert who believes in the mantra “customer first!” In this piece, he elaborates about how startups from the very beginning, can start emphasizing on their customers more. Let’s explore all the tips and advise the master unfolds here:

From Saurabh’s trunk of expertise….

“Customer is like a girlfriend or boyfriend. If they don’t feel the vibe, they will just go away and you won’t realize why!” – Saurabh Garg, Co-Founder & CBO, NoBroker.in

There’s a lot of noise about customer retention strategies these days! It is considered an important marketing pillar. For a very good reason – Bain & Co study shows that a 5% increase in customer retention can increase a company’s profitability by 75%.

While it is easier to accomplish in frequently used businesses such as groceries, e-commerce, and so on, but when you talk about businesses such as home buying and rentals, the customer does not return as fast. In fact, the customer having once used the service will return approximately in a year’s time. In businesses like these, the customer retention strategies have to be even more impactful. It is like you get one chance per year to impress your customer!

The Product

Firstly, strategy for any business is to build a great product that solves a real customer problem. The customer is always the king and must be served with best possible amenities. How can one do that? One can only do that by understanding the customer and not merely by building a ‘new’ product. The product should be ‘good’ and may or may not be ‘new’. The product should address the customer’s pain point. This one quality distinguishes successful businesses from aspirants.

Secondly, any customer is bound to remember a good service. If he is happy, he will gladly spread the word of mouth. Businesses who see happy customers as hyperlocal brand ambassadors usually survive the perils of time, fund crunch, trend change, etc.

Lifecycle

Once you understand the customer and his behavior well, you can tune your retention strategies around that. You have to remember that in today’s world the customer is bombarded with advertising and forgets a brand as early as 3 days. Therefore, it is important that you keep the customer engaged along the whole lifecycle till he comes back. There is no point in doing an untargeted advertising here as it will be much less impactful.

Let’s take the example of NoBroker

The customer typically comes back after 15-18 months once he has found a house. So, we divide the life cycle into 3 stages:

  1. 0-12 months: Here we push engaging and useful content for the customer. Something he can use once he has found a house. Like locality highlights, décor and interiors tips, vastu etc. This content is pushed regularly to the customer and since these are things he finds useful we get a pretty high engagement here.
  2. 12-14 months: This is the pre-transaction stage and we prepare the customers for the transaction. So, we will send them things like Guide to moving out, Guide to renting a house, testimonials etc. The person is about to enter into the zone and finds this content very informative.
  3. 14 – 30 months: This is the transaction zone and we target the customer with high frequency content like “50000+ non-broker houses waiting for you”, “Saved 600cr in brokerage in last 1 year”. The customer who is looking for a house gets this at the right time and decides to try the service because of this.

Impact

Our repeat users have jumped 7 fold in last 1 year and is growing even faster. This is like a snowball effect which keeps on adding continuously.

Some Things To Remember

Integrated communication (IMC) approach- SMS, Facebook, Video, Push, Email, Google

It is very important to have an integrated communication approach in lifecycle management. A customer needs to be exposed to communication at least 3+ times before he decides to take any action.

Think one step ahead

For instance, in our business, once we know that a customer has rented/bought a place, we do not sit and relax. We foresee what the customer might need next- rental/home agreement, packers and movers, etc. Anticipating customer needs and communicating the services at the right time, goes a long way in gaining customer loyalty.

Customers today want convenience and value.

If they see a brand that is with them at each step of their house rental or shifting journey, they are bound to come back and recommend you for a hassle-free experience!

Reward them for social shares

Frequently, encourage your customers to share their experience on their social media handle. Reward them for those shares. The end goal is to form a community of hyperlocal and hyper-loyal brand ambassadors.

Endnote

Retaining your customers could be the most profitable activity a company can do. But important is to remain a start-up and keep experimenting. The idea is to not fall prey to regular customer retention strategies. Understand your customer and what he would want. There is no “one size fits all” strategy that will ever come to rescue.

The above knowledge, tips, and personal experiences belong solely to Saurabh Garg of NoBroker. You can reach out to him for any advice related to this topic on LinkedIn (please check the author section below for information). If you would like to write a blog for PayUmoney as a guest please do get in touch with us: marketing@payu.in

With all your marketing efforts for your business in place, it’s a good idea to have an all-in-one payment solution in place as well. Now to enjoy the best payment gateway experience and grow your business effortlessly!

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[Streaming LIVE] PayU Event: Customer Retention 2018

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