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5 Easy Ways to Spring Clean Your Social Media Strategy

It’s that time of year again! Sunshine, flowers, and yep, spring cleaning. There’s nothing greater than cleaning out a closet you’ve been putting off all year, cleaning up your garden, or even cleaning up your social media strategy! There are so many things, both small and large-scale to improve your social media presence and marketing.

5 Ways To Spring Clean Your Social Media Strategy

There’s no better time to get rid of clutter than now. Here are five ways to get started with that spring cleaning . . .

1. Update Your Profile and Pages

Make sure you’re keeping your information up to date – this could even be done as often as every couple of weeks depending on your business! Here are some ways to update your pages:

Update your profile picture
Spice up your biography
Include a link to your newest product, a recent 5-star review from a customer, or a friendly message to welcome new customers
Create a new call-to-action
Incorporate keywords and buzzwords to get people interested
If you updated your brand with a different logo or colors, incorporate those into your profile and header photos

2. Create a Content Calendar

Making a content calendar can be extremely helpful to keep you and your business organized! Content calendars are great to keep your thoughts organized, especially if your company uses several different social media platforms. You can use a calendar to keep you on track for…

Social media posts
Email marketing, articles, and blogs
Video production
Networking or marketing events

3. Bring Those Goals Out of Storage

Goals grow and change, and some are even forgotten as the year goes on. There’s no better time than now to dust those goals off and pursue them! This is where our previous idea of using a content calendar can come in handy – keep yourself accountable for reaching your goals by visualizing deadlines and content for them by creating smaller goals to lead up to the big one. If you’re not sure why you didn’t meet your goals, take time to figure out where they can be changed to match your business better!

4. Check Out Your Competition

A little competitor analysis never hurt anybody. Check out their social media pages and see what kind of things they’re posting and what their audiences are engaging with, or better yet, look for what they might be missing. That way you can incorporate both into your social media strategy. Some things to look out for with your competitions are…

What kind of content are they posting?
How often are they posting?
What platforms are they using?
What content gets the most interaction, likes, comments, etc.?

5. Clean Up Your Social Media Strategy

After analyzing your competition’s social media strategy, take some time to study your own! You don’t need to start from ground up and completely revamp your marketing techniques, but take a look at small things. What’s working? What’s not working? What kind of content got the most interaction and engagement? Taking time to identify your business’ own strengths and weaknesses is a great way to determine what it needs and more importantly, what your customers need.

Taking some time out of your schedule to dust off some goals, clean up your video production strategy, and change up your business’ brand is the best way to clean up this spring! Not only will you feel a weight lifted, but your customers and business will thank you.

Instagram Quick Tips

Instagram has over 25 million business accounts, many of which are small businesses. It’s important to know if Instagram is a right fit for you. Whether you are B2B or B2C, this platform can fit your needs. Instagram is the perfect platform to make visual posts to appeal to your target audience. We know it can be confusing to determine which social platforms to use, how to set it up and even how to use it so we’ve put together a quick guide to make Instagram easy. Don’t forget, we’re a local business that is always here to help!

Who Uses Instagram?

It’s critical to know who uses Instagram to target your marketing to that specific audience.

Instagram Demographics That Matter to Social Media Marketers in 2020

Setting Up A Business Instagram Account

Click the links below and use these resources to set up an Instagram account for your business. Be sure to connect it with your business page. Paragon’s quick tips for you are to be sure to create the account with the same email used for your Facebook page and make sure you convert it to a business page instead of using a personal account.

Getting Started With Instagram
Connecting Facebook and Instagram
Set Up & Analyze Your Instagram Profile

Using Instagram

Once your business has an Instagram account, it’s critical to use it! Don’t just let it sit out there with no new activity. Paragon’s quick tip is to create content that attracts to your specific audience on Instagram (know who they are!) and don’t be afraid to interact with them.

Instagram Marketing: A Small Business Guide
8 Instagram Tips For Small Businesses

Talk To The Professionals

business marketing instagram social media

What to Know About Marketing

“Marketing” is a big, broad umbrella term that we’ve all heard, but what is marketing really all about and how can it benefit your business? Chances are you’re using a bunch of marketing techniques without realizing it!
Marketing, as a general meaning, is “the total of activities involved in the transfer of goods from the producer or seller to the consumer or buyer, including advertising, shipping, storing, and selling.” (Dictionary.com) This means that, yes, marketing is just the simple act of selling your product or services, but there is a lot more that can be done to promote and advertise your business.

Digital Marketing

This is probably the most important form of marketing, especially in the modern, digital age. Digital marketing includes:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Check out our blog about it here
Social Media posts and outreach. Check out our blog for tips and tricks on how to use it
Video marketing. Here’s a master list of all the different ways to incorporate video into your online marketing
Email and text message marketing. This is great to use when promoting an event or new product

There’s so much that goes into digital marketing, the possibilities are endless! If you’re not sure where to start with marketing, online is the place to begin. It’s a great way to not only promote your products and services, but it’s a great way to communicate directly with your customers.

Unique, High-Quality Service

While this one may seem obvious, the quality of your product is a great way to sell to customers and it’s the best way to stand out from competitors! Marketing your product becomes a lot easier if you and your customers understand the high quality value of it. Further, this extends to the unique face of your business. Not only do you want people to benefit from your services, but they want to get to know the unique personality of you.

Targeting Customers

This is another important aspect to understand about marketing. The best way to market your business, no matter the platform or medium, is to know who you’re selling your products to. Using Facebook or Instagram business account allows you to track the demographics of your consumers. Once you have those findings, take a look back at your posts and see which ones they interact with most, or if you’re just getting started, play around with a couple of different marketing techniques (email, social media, video, etc.) and see which one attracts the most people and go from there!

Branding

The face of your business is the first thing people see! From language to video style to the colors used in your logo, they should all be coherent and work together. This is a great marketing strategy because your consumers will become familiar with your work and find a sense of comfort when they see your posts, leading them to wanting to see your content more and more. Check out our blog on branding to get a more in depth idea of what it is.

Marketing can be intimidating, especially when you’re starting out, but these are great places to dip your toes into. Once you get the hang of it, you’ll be diving into the world of marketing in no time. Make sure to check out our linked blog posts to help you on your journey!

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How do you stand out from your competition?

Do you ever notice when you’re watching TV or listening to the radio, you hear a lot of businesses claiming to be the “#1 best” in the region, or even greater, the world? If you’re claiming to be the best or are striving to be, it’s important to stand out against your competitors. No matter where you go and no matter what, there’s competition. For nearly everything nowadays. Especially when it comes to selling services or a product, it’s crucial to be different from the rest and prove that you are a prospective customer’s greatest choice. From the product itself, to deals, branding, customer service, and advertisements, reach for uniqueness! We’ve discovered the best 5 different ways to stand out.

Promote Personality and Uniqueness

While there is benefit to looking at big corporations and researching what things they have done to become a successful business, it’s equally as important to be one-of-a-kind. Maybe your prices and services are similar to that of your competitors; you can’t mimic personality. Think about it from a consumer stand-point: wouldn’t you rather work with a company that sees the importance in quality service and being their authentic selves?

Story

Your consumers are people, too! They, like you, have emotions and stories. By crafting your company’s story into your pitches or advertisements, people care, and they listen. Not only does it allow for a great connection with your customers, it lets them get to know you on a personal level.

Quality

Yes, it’s great to have top-of-the-line products and services, but quality goes further than material. When in customer service and sales, are you going a step further to please your customers? By practicing quality, you can use it to your advantage from standing out from competitors. When prospectives look at your business, they would rather see positive, 5-star reviews from past and current customers than just a quality product with limited help everywhere else.

Design

We have touched on it in our blogs, about the importance of branding and websites, but design is crucial to the success of your business! The logo, name, and slogan are the first things people see when they search your business’ services. From your facebook ads to your website, colors and fonts should be coherent. Making a logo with notable design or colors will help customers remember your business and bring a personal touch.

Speed

People want to get stuff done! We live in a world where we’re constantly on the go and we want things faster. Think about how many times you needed a last-minute gift and Amazon same-day shipping helped you out. Even if your prices are similar, providing speed and efficiency is something people care about and will remember.

There are so many ways to stand out from your competitors, even beyond this list, but these are some great starting points to incorporate into your business today. For any of your traditional, digital and unique marketing needs, we’re here to help. We understand that no two businesses are the same, and we want to celebrate and accentuate your personality and uniqueness through marketing.

benefits brand competition promotion stand out

Websites—The Face Of Your Business

Websites. They’re the face of your business, your first impression on consumers, and a way to communicate with customers. Check out what you can do to update your website and what customers are looking for!

Personalization

In our previous blog, which you can find here, we talked about what it means to brand yourself – this includes your website! If your logo has certain colors in it, make sure you’re using that across your entire website. Keeping fonts, pictures, and color consist not only shows people that you have a clear brand, but they get to know you on a more personal level.

Ease of Navigation

Have you ever clicked on a restaurant’s website to try and order food and can’t find their phone number? How about frustrations with trying to schedule an appointment online? You may not realize it, but all of these small difficulties add up to a person’s impression of not only your website, but your entire business. If people can’t find it, how are they supposed to buy it? Use tabs to clearly label where things can be found. If you know of something that takes more than a couple of clicks to access, try adding a search bar to your website. You can also study the patterns of the use of your website and see where certain things can be fixed.

Call-to-Action

This one may seem obvious, but is often overlooked. You can have all the testimonials, photos, videos, and customer reviews that you want to validate the quality of your business, but if there’s nowhere to lead your customer to buy a product or an email to reach out to, how do they move forward with your services? Make sure there’s a, “contact us today,” or, “click here for more information,” etc. to point your customers in the right direction.

Updated Content

If you haven’t uploaded recent customer reviews, photos, or blog posts in a while, how do prospective customers know how you’re growing and developing? Having reviews from 8 years ago is great to show that your business has been about quality since day one, but how are consumers going to know how your business is doing now? Also, constant stream of uploading shows loyalty to your business and customers.

Social Media

People want to stay in touch and see what’s going on! Maybe you’re a heating and AC service company; chances are, customers don’t need your services on the daily or weekly. If you provide links to your Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc., your customers can stay in the know with your business and get to know you on a more personal level! That way, when it does come time for an HVAC tune up, they’ll know exactly who to call.

Personalized About Page

When it comes to making a business transaction with a new company, people want to know not only what your business offers, but how you got started, what your business’ morals are, and how you like to work. Including these things lets your customers get to know you on a more personal level. Would you rather do work with a company that provides their title and a bare minimum description of their services, or do you want to work with someone who is transparent and honest?

Validation and Testimonials

We touched on this one earlier, but this can really make or break providing services to a prospective customer. Showing before and after pictures of your services, video testimonials, or even written reviews from current and past customers lets consumers know how you run as a business, and of course, other people’s experience working with you. If your business takes pride in quality service for low prices, or treating your customers like family, make sure your customers are there to back you up! It only takes a couple of minutes to reach out to your customers and ask them to leave a review for you.

You have a lot of competitors. Make sure your competition has nothing on you! Be honest with prospective customers, stand out with your own personalized touch, and be open and consistent with communication.

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The Importance Of Branding Your Business

No matter how big or small your business is, creating a brand for yourself is crucial to the image, reputation, and success of your business. Branding yourself is beneficial to both traditional marketing and digital marketing, especially.

What does it mean to brand your business? It’s as simple as it sounds; a way for others to identify your business. From logo to language to advertisements. So, how do you get started? Branding can be somewhat complex, so we’ve broken down the different steps to make it easier for you.

Voice and Language

Is your company more laid-back and casual or professional? Do your morals fall around the importance of family, growth, community, or all of the above? Do you have a catchphrase you often find your employees and even consumers using? Once you identify the key parts that make your business your business, it’ll be easier to move forward.

Logo and Website

Visuals are everything! People will base their opinion of your business based off of not only the design of your logo, but how accessible and easy your website is to navigate through. Like your voice, your visuals should represent you and what you stand for. For example, we all know the iconic Nike swoosh. It symbolizes movement and speed. It depicts the art of movement, which is exactly what Nike is about. Once a logo is figured out, match the rest of your visuals on your website, advertisements, and video to that of your logo. This will bring familiarity and comfort to your customers.

Means of Marketing

While businesses can have great benefit from all forms of marketing, does yours have a signature way of marketing? Maybe it’s podcasts, digital art, or live streaming. The possibilities are endless and through trial-and-error, you can determine what your consumers love and look forward to and what may not be pushing a lot of traffic and engagement.

Be Authentic

Above all, most important is being authentic and real with your consumers. Across all platforms, customers not only love being able to interact with you, but showing off personality helps build trust. This goes for more than just communication with consumers. Make sure every aspect of your business is on the same page! From business cards to employees, promote yourself.

Seek Professional Advice

Branding can be a lot of work. There are a lot of moving parts that need to work to come together to make a beautiful, meaningful brand for your business. There’s nothing wrong with reaching out and asking for help. Whether it’s solely for digital advertisements, communicating, or all of the above, Paragon Marketing Group has got your back!

How Are You Using Video In Your Marketing?

We all know digital marketing is king in today’s age of technology, but what tops these strategies? Video marketing, which has been on the rise for the last few years, is now one of the best ways to market your business. According to Social Media Today, videos are shared 1200% more on social media than image and text combined. They also found that 64% of consumers are more likely to buy a product or service after watching a video about it. With numbers like these, who wouldn’t want to research the latest trends in video marketing? Don’t worry, we’ve already done the work for you.

Make it Personal

Before we dive into the different forms of videos to create, let’s talk content. 72% of consumers say they will only engage with marketing posts that are personalized (SmarterHQ). Making your videos more personal could mean having members from your business on screen selling a service rather than just text and graphics. Let’s say your company sells women’s clothing and that the majority of your audience are young women between the ages of 18-25, try to create content that they would find fun and relatable.

Live Streaming

While it’s recently become a popular platform, video streaming counts for over two-thirds of all internet traffic, and there’s so much your business can do with it! You can hop on a live stream and not only show customers new products, host Q&As, and make announcements, but you can interact with them in real time. Live streaming gives the option to have viewers submit their questions and comments in a chatroom while the video is happening, making communication personal and easy. Another benefit of streaming is that there’s no editing involved. Just open your laptop, start your livestream, and you’re set.

Long-form Videos

This one might surprise you, but research suggests that long-form videos are the way to go. We’ve all been told that the shorter the video, the better, especially with the short attention span of humans. However, this has recently changed. According to 23, videos under five minutes in length only receive less than one third of overall engage, whereas videos over 15 minutes can result in 50% overall engagement. This would require more pre production work and editing, but if you’re really looking to communicate with or send a message to your consumers, try it out!

Video Podcasts

Being another recent success in marketing, video podcasts are on the rise, and it’s exactly what it sounds like. Instead of just having your microphone set up, you also have a camera to record with. What’s the point? It’s always nice for consumers to put a face to the voices they’re used to hearing, and they can see exactly what’s happening in the studio. It’s another way to invite your audience on a personal level, and you have two times the amount of footage to use for marketing!

Regardless if you choose to try out one of these or all of these new video marketing techniques, remember what it’s about; your consumers. Video is one of the best tools to include new and long-term consumers in your business. It’s a way to show your appreciation for them, get out new and important information, and show the faces of your company!

Reviews and Testimonials

Reviews and testimonials. What are they? Why do they matter? A testimonial is a statement that supports the credibility of one’s business; aka a positive reputation builder! A lot of a business’ success relies on word-of-mouth and communication. Having written or recorded reviews and testimonials posted for your business will help bring in prospective customers and keep strong relationships with current customers.

Why Do You Need Testimonials and Reviews?

As stated before, credibility is everything for a small or growing business. Of course, you know your services and products work, but how are consumers supposed to know that? Reviews left on Google, Yelp, or your site verifying that your services provide 100% satisfaction for past customers helps support your claim. Chances are, you’re more willing to purchase or invest in something that has high reviews than something with zero reviews. While being conversational and quick with interaction with customers is helpful, they still may not feel ready to purchase or use your services without words of affirmation from past and current customers.

How Can My Business Gain Reviews?

You may think the only way to get reviews is sitting around and hoping a customer will decide to post about your business themselves, but that’s not the case! There’s nothing wrong with reaching out to customers and asking them to leave a review. You can ask them face-to-face, through a personalized email, or even making a post on social media. If your customers feel strongly about your good work and you have a positive relationship with them, don’t be afraid to reach out to them.

What are the Best Ways to Publicize Testimonials?

Google, Yelp, online forums
Chances are a prospective customer’s first interaction with you is through a search engine, use Google reviews and your website to your advantage.
Images
Using an image of your customer with their testimonial is a step up. Including a picture of the person leaving the review brings a more personal and direct message to consumers.
Video
Video is huge nowadays in building a business! Consumers love to be able to visualize what’s going on, and it’s easy to do with testimonials. It doesn’t have to be a fancy production with animations and crazy video effects. It can be a simple video recording of your customer speaking about their experience with you and verbalizing their testimonial. Video makes it engaging and intimate! Having prospective customers being able to watch a real person leave an authentic message is the best way to provide credibility.

Look Into The Future—Plan Your 2020 Marketing

The air is getting crisper, the holidays are in full bloom, and before you know it, the 2019 calendar year will be over. A new year rings in the opportunity for new marketing ideas! But you shouldn’t wait until January 1st to think of a game plan for your business for 2020. Why should you make a marketing plan? Not only will you be ready to hit the ground running, but brainstorming ideas and creating a plan ahead of time will keep you and your business organized. So, let’s look at the trends and strategies we expect to see in 2020 and how your business can incorporate them into your marketing plan.

Video Production and Live Streaming

Video production is one of the best tools to use for marketing in today’s digital world, just take a look at Youtube celebrities! Creators and Influencers have become worldwide sensations just from starting with sitting in front of a camera. With the power of video you can communicate with your audience, authenticate and personalize each video, and promote your business with sit-down videos, tutorials, Q&As, etc. Live streaming has been on the rise for the last couple of years in visual marketing, but it’s bigger than ever now. It’s estimated to be a $70.5 billion industry by 2021. Live videos are unedited, raw footage. This is a great way to have your audience really get to know you, it’s quick, and it’s easy.

Insight

There’s a lot of data your company has probably compiled in the week to last year; use it as a tool! Let’s say one of your posts, blogs, or emails got double or triple the amount of clicks than what’s average; why was it so popular? Take the data from your most popular and unpopular posts and determine what kind of content was it that you were putting out and why it was so successful. Turn that around for 2020, and try incorporating more of what worked into your marketing techniques. For example, if you’re a video marketing company and your blogs and posts on drone footage and use, are always successful and your posts about video editing aren’t so successful, try making video editing topics more exciting, and recycle and find new drone content to use.

Consumer Behavior

If your company still uses a lot of traditional marketing techniques, try switching your content up with something that your customers will find easy to use, useful, and fun. For example, most people are making google searches from their smartphones – make sure your content and website layout is compatible and easy to navigate from a phone screen. Furthermore, the way people make searches are different. Image and voice search are becoming more and more popular, so make sure your SEO is up to date! (Check out our blog on SEO here.)

With all of these things in mind, remember that it’s okay to step outside of the box! If there’s a new video editing technique you want to try out in one of your marketing videos, don’t be afraid to test it out. A new year means new opportunity, and your business should take full advantage of new trends, techniques, and strategies!

Text Marketing Gets Results

Business owners are always looking for ways to grow their contact lists. Whether it is going to networking events, social gatherings, or email campaigns; increasing the amount of prospects to keep the sales funnel full is crucial. What is the one thing that most everybody has and they use everyday? You guessed it, cellphones! So why not use them to your advantage? Our firm recently used a texting campaign in order to grow a clients list.

The Oconomowoc Chamber of Commerce was discussing ways at their monthly marketing meeting to drive traffic to a section of their website. This section is where chamber members can post specials, coupons, or other items for the public to take advantage. Currently, the section was not being utilized to its full potential by the members so the chamber wanted to find a way to increase its use by its members. There were many attempts using other methods to increase its use but those methods had fair success. We made a suggestion to try a text marketing campaign during a recent locally sponsored movie event in the downtown area.

The approach for this was actually very simple. The creation of the texting account took no more than 10 minutes to set up and ready to go. The staff of the chamber created a flyer that business owners could post in their stores for the public to see during this event as many people enter a variety of stores during the event. An email was drafted and sent to all members announcing the new “texting program” and urging them to participate. All the businesses needed to do was print the flyer, post in their store and place their special on the chambers website through their portal. That was it..quick and painless.

The chamber saw a dramatic increase in usage of this section of their website by its members totaling an increase of 17 additional users. But what was even better than this was the increase in contacts and visits the chamber received through the texts. On the night of the event, there were 108 direct responses to the texting campaign from people entering in the chambers texting number. Which means that the chamber collected 108 new contacts to promote future events and members specials to. In addition to collecting new contacts, the members specials section of the website saw 292 user visits the night of the event.

So as you can see through the results of this actual event, you can use technology to your advantage to raise awareness for your business and grow your audience. It just takes a little time and effort to set up the system and you’re off and running.