Rebrand Your Business Without Losing Your Audience

 

The rebrand of your business can take many forms, from picking a new name to implementing a new business model. While these changes are taking place, businesses must still work to connect and communicate with customers.

Is it possible to rebrand a business without losing your audience and disappointing current customers? Five business owners shared their tips on how to make it all work.

Know why you are rebranding.

A rebrand is a major undertaking, involving your marketing, web presence, client list, employees and mission. The process is more likely to succeed if you have compelling reasons for the change.

David Black, head of marketing and customer support for Retire Ready Solutions, helped guide his company through a rebrand that involved both a major name change and a refocusing of services. In their case, a rebrand was necessary to encourage growth and clarify their services. However, if that’s not the case for your business, he said, rebranding could do more harm than good.

“If it isn’t essential, there may be easier ways to grow your business,” said Black. “If [your] company is leaning toward rebranding, make sure to think through everything that will be affected and consider the time, expense, and work that will need to go into it and whether the [return on investment] will justify the expense and effort.”

When Rod Hughes, the vice president of Kimball Hughes Public Relations, helped oversee the company’s rebrand from Kimball Communications, he worked hard to communicate that the change was primarily about earning and maintaining their clients’ trust.

“I became an owner [and] partner in the business in 2016, and we wanted clients to understand when they worked with me, they were working with a decision-maker for the business,” said Hughes. “Our agency president, Gary Kimball, plans to retire in 2020, and we felt it was important to our existing clients, as well as prospective clients, to see a continuity of leadership and a long-term transition plan for management of the agency.”

Don’t commit to a rebrand without clear, strategic, customer-centered reasons. And once you do, make sure customers know exactly what those reasons are if you want to maintain their loyalty.

Have a comprehensive strategy before you start.

“The decision to rebrand was a fairly easy one to take,” said Black. “The difficulties arose in the details and the implementation. Like peeling back layers of an onion, you don’t realize all that goes into a rebrand until you get into it.”

Many businesses are surprised by the complexities involved in a rebrand. While initial plans may focus on a new name and matching domain, the process is likely to involve designing new logos, branded company products, a new website design and content, product guides, the services you offer, and even the clients you pursue. To ensure the process runs smoothly without losing customers, have a strategy in place before you begin.

Plan for the changes that will need to be made as well as which parts of your marketing and business strategy will be affected. Designate members of your team to be in charge of each area, from making design decisions to communicating with the public.

“Rebranding is a process through which you reset your mission and priorities going forward … Work to reflect that in your branded materials as well as in the minds of your customers,” said Hughes. “It’s a significant undertaking and should be treated as such.”

Anticipate questions and concerns.

Communicating with customers during a rebrand is key to maintaining existing client relationships. If customers doesn’t understand why changes are happening, they may lose trust in the business, and you could see a significant drop in revenue.

Brian Moak, the owner of HEART Certified Auto Care in Chicago, rebranded his family’s business to expand it into a national franchise. But during the process, he found that many existing customers worried that the name change and expansion meant the family-owned business had been bought out. To preserve their trust, Moak worked to anticipate the questions customers would have and provide answers before they took their business elsewhere.

“During a rebranding process, keep your communication simple, straightforward and speak to people’s fears and concerns,” Moak advised. “Change is scary, and people … need clear explanations and reassurance to understand, support, and buy into your vision.”

When marketing agency GMR Web Team rebranded to focus on clients in the healthcare industry, owner and founder Ajay Prasad found that understanding the concerns of employees was as important as anticipating questions from customers. Employees, he pointed out, are the ones responsible for communicating with customers, and without their support and understanding, customers will be left in the dark.

“Make sure you have a sound business reason for rebranding. Discuss [it] with your team and get their buy-in. That way, your employees can easily communicate it to existing and potential clients, and understand the goals they should be tracking,” said Prasad. “Every rebrand is meant to improve a business, so everyone needs to understand where to expect those improvements.”

Publicize your rebrand.

Communicating with your customers doesn’t have to be internal or private. All five business owners found that talking about their rebrand as publicly as possible didn’t just help them maintain their current level of business – it led to an increase.

“We … used social media, press releases, and media contacts to communicate with customers and the general public,” said Black when describing how Retire Ready shared the news about their rebrand. “We saw an increase in traffic to our website and greater interest in our company, because there was a better understanding of what we offered, and it was easier to find us in search engines.”

Moak found that when his team went public about the reasons for HEART’s rebrand, his customers stepped up to offer their encouragement and support. “Our customers are thrilled that we are trying to expand our mission to other communities,” he said.

Kris Gösser, the chief marketing officer for healthcare cloud compliance company Datica, oversaw the company’s rebrand right before their industry’s largest trade show of the year. With such a high-profile event coming up, Datica’s team had to talk publicly about the rebrand and the reasons behind it. This, said Gösser, was good for the company.

“We had an overwhelming positive reaction from our customers. They definitely liked our new name, new identity, new aesthetic and new vibe in the market,” he said. “… [Customers] were more happy to associate with Datica than they were with [our former] brand.”

Don’t drop the ball on existing customers.

Strategies, like being transparent about your rebrand and having a clear plan for how to accomplish it, go a long way toward retaining customers. But the best way to avoid a drop in business is to focus on maintaining excellent service, no matter what else is going on.

“If possible, ensure that the rebrand affects your existing clients as little as possible,” advised Prasad. “It will take time for the new focus to start paying off, so you do not want the current revenue flow to drop.”

In the course of its rebrand, his business narrowed its client-acquisition focus to the healthcare industry. But Prasad also made sure that existing non-healthcare clients knew they were still a priority. “We sent a blast [via email] telling them that we will only accept healthcare-related businesses as new clients and that nothing will change for them. Our clients like us, and no one had any issue with our repositioning decision. We even kept our old website live … and told our non-healthcare clients to use [it].”

The ultimate goal of any rebrand should be to grow the business by better serving your customers. Sometimes that requires putting client services ahead of the rebrand. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Hughes found that his firm’s rebrand took longer than anticipated in part because existing clients had to be the company’s top focus. “The process of rebranding will take longer than you expect,” Hughes said. “Competing priorities – especially client or customer-facing priorities – will always require your time and attention ahead of the rebrand.”

That willingness to delay the rebrand in order to focus on service paid off, Hughes added. The firm didn’t lose a single client during or after the rebrand, and old customers are just as happy as new ones.

 

Culled from Business News Daily

Post Tags:#Branding#business#new business#rebranding

Dedication and Willingness to be Terrible: How Ishiguro won the Nobel

 

Kazuo Ishiguro wrote the bulk of The Remains of the Day in four weeks. All it took was extreme dedication—and a willingness to be terrible.

In the way the sculpture or carpentry is a craft, writing is a craft. There is art, lifestyle, and romance to it. Writers don’t just jumble words on blank pages; writing is a mix of discipline, dedication, a staring into the abyss of the subconscious, and a unison with the supernatural. Like a worker of clay, writers mash words, and are themselves mashed and caked in the clay of the art.

Writing is a delicious work, but it is for the most part simply work. It’s often lonely. It’s rarely romantic. “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect,” Anaïs Nin said.

Writing is refreshing and exciting, and it is also a public service. Writers of literature are public servants in that they use their stage not just to celebrate literature but to also put the creation of literature in its place – of mirroring the society. And it’s especially refreshing when writers at the highest levels of the field do that. One of them has been Kazuo Ishiguro, the British novelist and the latest winner of the Nobel Prize.

On Thursday, 5th October 2017 the Nobel Committee announced Ishiguro as its 2017 laureate for literature. The Committee noted in its citation, that came in part because the author, “in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.”

Almost immediately after the announcement was made, a story from The Guardian, written by Ishiguro himself and published in December of 2014, began circulating on social media. The piece is headlined, “Kazuo Ishiguro: How I Wrote The Remains of the Day in Four Weeks.” The article details how the author overcame the consensus about writing, and most importantly the haul of life’s demand, to conjure enough letters that would become Ishiguro’s most famous piece.

Due to distractions from the “first flurry of public success” that accompanied his second novel, an end seemed to have come to his “proper” work, spending a whole year fruitlessly to write the opening chapter of a book. So Ishiguro and his wife, Lorna, hatched a plan to jump-start his creativity:

I would, for a four-week period, ruthlessly clear my diary and go on what we somewhat mysteriously called a “Crash.” During the Crash, I would do nothing but write from 9 a.m. to 10:30 p.m., Monday through Saturday. I’d get one hour off for lunch and two for dinner. I’d not see, let alone answer, any mail, and would not go near the phone. No one would come to the house. Lorna, despite her own busy schedule, would for this period do my share of the cooking and housework. In this way, so we hoped, I’d not only complete more work quantitively, but reach a mental state in which my fictional world was more real to me than the actual one.

The goal, essentially, was to deliberately create an environment in which the author and his narrative might be fused into one. It was a crash. “Throughout the Crash,” Ishiguro notes, “I wrote free-hand, not caring about the style or if something I wrote in the afternoon contradicted something I’d established in the story that morning. The priority was simply to get the ideas surfacing and growing. Awful sentences, hideous dialogue, scenes that went nowhere—I let them remain and ploughed on.”

And he hooked it. Four weeks later, Ishiguro had a draft of The Remains of the Day. He tinkered with it still, yes. He added and trimmed and honed. For the most part, though, he had, in a concentrated month, completed a masterpiece. He’d spent his year of unproductivity, he notes, doing the background work of the writing—he’d read books by and about British servants, and histories, and “The Danger of Being a Gentleman”—and the Crash came at a time when Ishiguro knew what he needed to know to write what he wanted to write. All that was required was to sit down and do the work.

It’s a helpful reminder to writers of literature both serious and less so—and to anyone who might be intimidated by talk of writing’s metaphysical properties. “If you mix Jane Austen and Franz Kafka then you have Kazuo Ishiguro in a nutshell, but you have to add a little bit of Marcel Proust into the mix,” said Sara Danius, the permanent secretary of The Swedish Academy, explaining the Committee’s choice of Ishiguro. “Then you stir, but not too much, then you have his writings.”

It’s high, and accurate, praise—but it is the reward for Ishiguro’s quest for knowledge, strong spirit to make a difference, unchained mind, and stalwart dedication to link the clutters of words, dialogues and character. And it is indeed a vital imaginative breakthrough!

• CAREER
• DEDICATION
• WRITING

Why Should Authors Care About Digital Marketing?

One of the biggest challenges for independent authors is getting their book in front of readers. There are millions of books published every year, and unless you’re very famous independently of your book, odds are that you’re nervous about how to get people interested. That’s where digital marketing comes in. You’ve probably heard this term before, especially as you travel down the road of independent publishing. You’re probably asking questions like: What does digital marketing entail? How does it get books in front of readers? And how could it work for me?

Digital marketing is simply getting your book information in front of Internet consumers, typically in the form of online advertising. So why should you develop a digital marketing strategy?

People Are Online

Consumers spend 5 hours per day on mobile devices. That’s right—5 hours. This is the majority of people’s leisure time, so the best place to find that perfect reader is during their daily Facebook scroll or YouTube binge.

No Need for Marketing Studies

In the past, if you were manufacturing lip gloss and wanted to advertise to TV-watchers, you’d have to pay someone to do a market study of various TV shows, figure out which audiences buy a lot of lip gloss, and take out ads based on that information. The Internet has changed that. Now, Facebook will tell you that there are 3.7 million people who love James Patterson and exactly who they are. If you’re a thriller writer, you’ve just found your audience without expensive market studies.

Digital Marketing Is Less Expensive

Most digital advertising on any social media platform can be adapted to all budgets. Remember that TV ad I mentioned earlier? Not only did you have to do a market study to see if it’s worthwhile, you also had to spend thousands of dollars on the slot and production. Very few independent authors have that kind of cash just lying around. Digital advertising doesn’t have these kinds of requirements. You can adapt the advertising to fit your budget, and though you may find more success with more money, you can still get your book in front of more readers with small advertisements than with no advertisements at all.

You Can Boost Book Sales and Your Online Platform Simultaneously

If you decide to market your book on social media platforms, you get the double benefit of driving social media users to buy your book and generating awareness of your social media profiles. Because they are seeing these ads from your author page, readers who buy the book will be more likely to follow your profile and learn about your new projects—which makes your book marketing for the second book faster and cheaper.

You Control the Content

Did you start an ad, only to think of a better idea or notice that no one seems interested? Then change it. Unlike traditional print or TV advertising, you are not stuck with bad ideas or ineffective ads. The ease with which an ad can be updated or adapted is a huge benefit to advertisers of all sorts.

Once the writing is finished, finding ways to get readers interested in your book is your number one task. Learning about tools such as digital marketing will provide insight when you talk to book publicity and book marketing firms about plans for your book and expand the ways you can reach your book’s newest reader.

Source: Ingramspark

Why The Traditional Rules Of Writing Still Matter: 5 Content Creation Tips

Over the past two decades, digital content needs have transformed tremendously. With the switch around the turn of the century towards writing for search engines, the basic principles of writing got lost. People who have never constructed valuable content were suddenly loading their sites with garbage just to drive traffic, which hopefully led to sales.

Regardless of how sloppy they were, these content efforts actually worked – for a bit. But as search engine algorithms have become smarter, content creation strategies require a revised approach. Modern machine learning-based algorithms can quickly find thin and irrelevant content and immediately discredit content accordingly.

The answer to today’s content needs is twofold: First, content must be written well with not only proper spelling and grammar but syntax – a return to traditional form, if you may. Second, the content must fit this form while also abiding by the rules of SEO, which includes a few must-haves, such as keywords based on research, proper headlines containing main keywords and attention-grabbing meta descriptions.

At my company, our content division adheres to traditional writing standards that are tailored for search engines. With that said, here are five content creation tips that every digital market needs to abide by for true success.

Think People First, Optimization Second

When the writing process begins for any type of digital content – whether a blog post about the benefits of a product or the product/service pages themselves – don’t think about writing for search engines. Rather, think about writing for people.

With the billions of digital platforms available, people want quality first. Most can tell a fake immediately and will quickly move onto a competitor. For true quality, write content that solves problems, educates, entertains and above all, adds value.

One technique that my content team at LSEO utilizes when writing is based on the importance of social media. Write content that your target customers would want to share across their social media platforms. If it’s worth it for them, it’s likely worth it for their social media audience, which will naturally spread the word about your brand.

Keywords Are Everything

Creating a targeted keyword list is an absolute must before any writing happens. There are multiple strategies available online for targeted keyword generation, but one can easily generate keywords on a topic-by-topic basis. There are multiple tools available; we rely on SEMRush and Searchmetrics to create the most optimal keyword list.

For example, say you owned a digital marketing firm that offered content creation and you wanted to build a service page on “content creation.” You would use tools to research the term and see things like what kind of monthly volume it has and how competitive it would be to actually rank for that term. These tools also provide longer-tail keywords that relate to your business which may have less volume but would be easier to rank for, such as “digital marketing content” and “content marketing SEO.”

Keyword research also leads to additional ideas for content creation, whether it would be a blog post that supports a service page or an entirely new service itself.

Understand Your Audience

Once you have your keywords and topics, the next vital form of research is understanding your audience. Research all of your top competitors and get a feel for voice and what topics are trending. If they have case studies of their clients, analyze them. Do any type of research possible to find out the demographics of your intended audience and continue to do so as long as you’re in business. Target customer demographics change often, so make sure you’re on top of all research.

Also, know the jargon of your industry, from buzzwords to technical terms, and use them regularly. Just having the jargon of an industry down will help create your authority in the space. Along with authority arrives respect, confidence and trust, which creates strong client relations.

Observe The 30-Second Rule

When you start writing, spend much time crafting your headline and opening paragraph. When creating, abide by the 30-second rule. This rule states that you have a maximum of 30 seconds to sell yourself before selling your product or services, so create the energy needed to move prospective customers along. The less time it takes you to garner their full attention, the quicker you’ll have a customer. And apply this rule when choosing a lead image that sets off your content.

**

Forbes

Post Tags:#tips

Tips for Making Your Books Attractive to Readers

When it comes to people buying your books, a lot depends on you. That is, you have the power to make people pick out your book from an array of books.

There are times when readers don’t have any particular book in mind. They are just interested in adding to the number of books in their library.

As a writer, you have a responsibility of turning heads in the direction of your books if you intend to make sales or become famous for your work. This responsibility can be shared with your publisher or graphic designer, but a major chunk of it rests on you.

In this post, I’ll show you a few tips to help you in that regard.

1. A good title

One of the first things that captivate a reader is the title of a book. When the title is captivating, readers would want to know more about the book, what it entails and what they can gain from it.

In selecting a good title, you are not just looking for one that would attract your reader, you are also looking for one that will depict the true content of the book – either directly or figuratively.

Take Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The titles of most of her books are not often straightforward, but they depict the content of her books. And take R.L. Stine. Most of the titles of his books give you a hint as to what to expect in the book. But either way, their titles are appropriate, and they make any reader want to pick them up especially if it is in the area of their interest.

2. A good summary

Another thing that attracts a reader to a book is the blurb on the back page. When readers decide to shop for books in a store, they pick up a book that interests them and turn to the back to read the blurb, or read the brief description of the book if they are shopping online.

The blurb says a lot about a book and can determine whether or not the book will be purchased or read. As a writer, endeavor to put your thoughts together to capture many thoughts in a few words and present them to your readers. That way, as soon as they pick up the blurb, they are compelled to read the whole book.

3. Good first chapter

Sometimes, many readers bypass the process of reading the blurb or caring about the title and just want to delve into the book. Other times, they may go through those processes and create time from a tight schedule to read the book.

But they must keep going, and that first chapter has to be the fuel that will push them to the end.

4. Attractive cover or design

Many times, people pick up a book because of the cover design, whether the combination of colours, the design, or the picture used on the book.

Things as basic as these have the ability to attract a reader. And this is very important, especially in children’s books. Once the back cover catches the eye, there is a high probability that the book would be picked up, and eventually read.

5. Appropriate genre position

There are times when the genre of your book contributes to how well your book will call to your readers. This works with some of the other tips listed above.

When your book is listed in a certain genre, readers should be able to pick it up, look through it and be satisfied that it is what they are looking for.

So, the ball’s in your court.

**

Olamide Omolawal is an avid research enthusiast with an interest in creative and content writings.

10 Things to Look Out for when Line Editing

Line editing makes your sentences the best they can be. That means removing all the unnecessary words; making sure the word usage is correct and that the writing flows seamlessly. A professional line editor will do this for you, but it’s a useful skill to master if you can. Below are ten things to look out for that’ll make the most out of your line edit.

 1. Make sure your sentences make sense

Read your work as a reader with a fresh pair of eyes – this might mean putting the work aside for a few weeks and doing something else. Look out for clunky wordings, wrong tenses and misused metaphors.

 2. Syntax should be easy to follow and understand

Look at the following sentence: “by agreement he called me up, and though it was very foul, windy, and rainy morning, yet down to the waterside we went, but no boat could go, the storm continued so.” The order of words and clauses is hard to follow. Let’s simplify it by rephrasing and dividing it up into several shorter sentences: “He called me up as promised. Although it was a foul, windy, and rainy morning, we went down to the waterside. The storm continued as we watched the boats unable to leave.” Punctuation is your best friend, use it well!

3. Eliminate any words that lessen the impact

A lot of line editing involves thinking about whether the composition of words in a sentence is the best possible one. To do this, try changing the way the sentence is constructed. Often you’ll have to get rid of words which we tend to use often, but are unnecessary. For example: “my offer should actually really be considered.” A simple line edit makes this sentence more straightforward and effective: “you should consider my offer.”

4. Hold your reader’s attention

If you’re having trouble with the previous point, try asking yourself this question: “does this sentence or paragraph hold my attention?”. If a sentence or a paragraph is long-winded and unnecessary, however much time you spent over it and however much you like it, it has to go.

5. Get rid of any terms or phrases that convey an unintended meaning

It’s good practice to think about your work with your readers in mind. Of course, it’s not possible to please everyone, but you should be aware of projecting bias or prejudice through the choice of words, even if they are unintentional. For example, instead of saying “physical handicap”, it’s better to talk about “physical impairment”.

6. Use a thesaurus

Do away with your scruples (if you have any) and get friendly with a thesaurus. I don’t mean change every word to an obscure one, but it’s a useful tool to avoid repeating words. For example, if you find you’re talking about your hero’s ‘sparkling blue eyes’ too often, use a thesaurus to change some of these to glinting or glittering.

 7. Don’t edit out your voice

Be careful not to over-edit and lose your tone in the process. If you’re paying a professional line editor, make sure they understand your voice. If you are line editing yourself, it’s sometimes helpful to take a break between editing stages and remind yourself of the main attributes of your voice that makes it unique. Don’t lose it.

8. Eliminate Cliches

Pick any phrases you’ve heard and read too many times and get rid of them. If conveying the meaning is crucial to your text, there are other ways of doing so. Come up with your own metaphor or nail a new phrase. Consider the following sentence: “needless to say, he wasn’t up for joining a vicious circle of ‘eat, work and sleep’.” Make your writing your own: “he loved life. He couldn’t sacrifice it for toiling away at a job that didn’t satisfy him.”

9. Double check the words and facts you aren’t sure about

It never hurts to double check. It’s common to use a word or a fact you’re not too sure about and then forget about it. Always, always check for its meaning – if not when you are writing, at least when you are line editing.

10. Get help online

My last tip is optional, but may work for those of you who are still in the ‘training stage’ of line editing. Hemingway is an online app – you paste in the text and Hemingway automatically highlights problems in your writing. Alternatively, there’s the online editing course Get Your Book Fit on Udemy which contains plenty of useful tips on all stages of editing.

Lastly, don’t let line editing overwhelm you. It’s an important skill that helps you tighten the screws with your writing, and doesn’t have to be a chore. Get your pen at the ready, cut yourself a slice of cake and make it fun anyway you can.

(c) Adriana Bielkova

Credit: https://www.writing.ie/resources/10-things-to-look-out-for-when-line-editing/

• EDITING
• WRITING

7 Social Media Management Tips to Save Time & Improve Results

Why is social media management important? According to data from Mainstreethost, social networks are the 2nd most popular way to research brands, just behind search engines. We can google “Faux-suede shirt” and receive an ad from UNTUCKit—but it’s fairly unlikely that I would purchase that shirt before doing my research on the brand.

First, check them out on Facebook, see some reviews; check Twitter and Instagram for discounts. It’s like doing recon for a blind date! I want to know I’m not going to get ripped off; and in the process, the brand should utilize these social channels to develop a relationship with me as a customer.

That being said, I think we agree that social media management can be a stream of irritation. Your brand needs to be engaging, posting and sharing constantly—but who has time for that? I have gathered a list of tips that my colleagues and I use for WordStream’s social media management to help save time, save money, and grow and engage your audience.

1. Social Media Management: Focus on Quality

It is always good to have a constant flow of content and announcements, but I would much rather have nothing at all than abysmal posts with incorrect information.  We want to make sure that we are sharing content that is good enough to be re-shared or retweeted, passed on to colleagues across industries.

We also try to look for content that will last, not just trend for a week and disappear. If you are able to produce content or develop insights that will stay relevant in the industry, these are gold! For us, social media content does really well on—surprise!—social media. This tweet was posted in mid-June and I’m still seeing it being retweeted even now.

It’s a bummer that this doesn’t direct to WordStream, but we have content posted on it, too!

Think about it this way, if someone writes a terrible post without citing sources and shares it on social media—are you going to interact with it? And what does that post say about your credibility as a brand?

2. Analyze Data to Find the Perfect Quantity

…and almost as important, quantity. Because let’s face it, social media is about what is going on NOW, right this second. This is especially true for Twitter; we recently found that engagement rate increased 46% week over week after publishing 30 more tweets than the week prior. In fact, those 30 extra tweets helped push 30% more traffic to the website with 60% more link clicks than the previous week.

During the week with 30 extra posts, there was an average of 5.9K link clicks daily.

It can be hard to get visibility as organic reach continues to decrease, and the one way we’ve found to combat this is to post more often. My favourite trick is to re-post content multiple times—for blog posts, I’ll share it on Twitter up to 5 times on the day it is published. Just make sure you’re not being spammy on Facebook! People hate that. Truly, I’ve seen the comments…

Another good trick is to stay aware of demand—keep your eye on trending topics in your industry’s sphere. Chime in when you can! This will increase your engagement rate and potentially garner more followers.

3. Be Charming (Tools Can Help!)

When my mother complains about social media, she references her friends that only post to brag. “Tommy got into Harvard AND Yale! Such a hard choice!” *Insert picture of the son as the homecoming king*. But, being the charmer she is, she will congratulate them (with a “xoxo”) and as a result, they will like and share and comment on her posts as well. Be my mother! What goes around, comes back around: engage with others and they will engage with you. Though this sounds silly, Larry swears by it.

Yes, my mother’s last profile picture was a flower pot. For 4 years.

One of my biggest challenges is finding content to tweet and post about! A way to tackle this is through social media management tools like Mention and Buzzsumo, which will send alerts your way when a keyword you select is posted online. I currently use keywords like “WordStream” or “Larry Kim” to see if others are posting about us. Then I can retweet their content! Another great resource is Feedly, an RSS feed website that helps you read your favourite blogs all in one space, or Klout, which suggests original content that hasn’t been seen by your audience yet.

4. Use Scheduling Tools

Because no one expects you to manage your social media accounts so intensely that you are manually posting 20+ times per day. Actually, who is reading these daytime posts?! Procrastinators, I see you…

I personally use Hootsuite, which had been conveniently set up before I started working in social media. I’ve also tried Buffer, which works similarly. For a complete list, check out our post on Social Media Management Tools.

Hootsuite dashboard for WordStream

I have found that the most important part of these tools (other than the obviously time-saving) is their ability to auto-schedule posts when your account is most likely to see high engagement. It takes a certain amount of brain power to pick times for 10+ posts per day, and this a huge help. If you’d like to simply analyze your twitter sphere timing, Hubspot has a handy tool called TweetWhen which will select your most retweetable time of day, and Tweriod will select the best times to tweet.

5. Automate Repetitive Tasks with IFTTT

IFTTT, short for If This, Then That, is a social media recipe website! In a series of simple steps, this website will help you set up simple commands which link up different applications to automatically perform actions if triggered. For example, IF the weather app tells you there is a high UV index, THEN a reminder to put on sunscreen is triggered. IF you are tagged in a photo on Facebook, THEN save the photos to dropbox.

At WordStream, we have a few blogs that we follow and trust to post quality content consistently that is of interest to our audience. We were able to set up a recipe that automates the sharing process. IF a certain blog posts new content, THEN tweet the post to our followers on Twitter.

6. Utilize Social Media Analytics

Does this need an explanation? How do you know how many people are seeing your posts and engaging if you don’t look at the numbers! Make decisions based on data!

I won’t pretend to be an expert in analytics, but I appreciate the vast number of metrics available. Luckily, there are experts out there, like the fine people analyzing tweets at Buffer, Twitter themselves, and Kissmetrics, who are kind enough to give us a beginner’s guide to Facebook insights. Personally, I tend to watch post engagement (based on audience size) and URL clicks when managing social media because our goals are to expand and engage our followers while driving them to the site.

7. Be a Real Person

As individuals, we have a higher tendency to follow accounts of “real people” vs. businesses even if we don’t personally know the person. I have tried my hardest to show on social media that WordStream is a real place with a real person with a real personality behind it! To get some ideas, Gizmodo and Contently have companies that manage their social accounts with flair and sass and everything people love…about real people. My personal favourites are Chipotle, Seamless, and Nutella. This says nothing about my real-life favourite things, I swear.

My favourite thing to do on Twitter is to find disgruntled customers and respond, trying to solve their issues. In a survey from InSites Consulting, 83% of companies reported that they deal with questions or complaints sent via social media, so I’m not alone. This is a great way to show that your company cares and has a face and personality behind the façade.

This customer had tweeted @WordStream unhappily reporting his dashboard was broken. We were able to respond and get it fixed! Previous tweets have since been deleted.

We already know from Larry that posts with emojis receive more attention. Similarly, when examining our tactics with images, we found that photos will generally receive more attention. This was further affirmed by Convince&Convert, who report that posts with pictures generate 150% more retweets. At WordStream, we analyzed posts on Twitter and Facebook and found that the most retweeted or liked posts featured images of real people–#PPCkid and images of our employees worked fairly well, but even memes featuring a real human work as well.

This is the back of everyone’s head at WordStream. It received 200% more likes than a post directing to an article a few minutes later.

Just like PPC, managing social media accounts is a constant work in progress. I’m keeping an eye out to see how Facebook’s new algorithm will affect our organic visibility while being vigilant about metrics and engagement across all channels. Do you have any great tips that I missed? Let me know!

Wordstream

Post Tags:#Social media#social media management

9 Tips to Get More Preorders for Your Next Book

There are a lot of great reasons for you to boost your book’s preorders:

• Preorders allow your biggest fans to express their enthusiasm for your work
• Having a book available for preorder gives the impression that you’re a successful, “must-read” author
• Preorders give you yet another useful marketing angle to promote your work (while extending the promotional timeframe)
• Making your book available for preorder gives you an opportunity to identify your most ardent fans
• Preorders help you build hype and anticipation, making it more likely that your book will be a bestseller

But you can’t just make your book available for preorder and expect people to buy it en masse; you have to do some work to ensure that your preorder campaign is a success.   Thankfully, we’ve got some great tips to help you maximize the preorders for your next book!

How to Drive Book Sales Through Preorders: 9 Tips

#1 — Tell Everyone You Know   One of the best pieces of preorder advice we’ve encountered was given by author and entrepreneur Julian Hosp back in Episode 66 of The Author Hangout. Julian is a master of getting preorders, and one of his recommended methods is simple but incredibly effective: contact everyone you know personally, whether they’re in your phone’s contacts, your email, on your Facebook friends list or elsewhere.   Making this personal connection means a lot to people, and it can help you spread awesome word-of-mouth promotion for your book. This takes time and effort, but it’s something that can pay off in a big way!

#2 — Take Advantage of Your Email List   Your email list is the cornerstone of your author platform, and getting preorders is a wonderful way to make use of it. The people on your list are more likely to preorder your book, so be sure to let them know about it!

#3 — Set the Price Low   It’s much easier to get people to preorder when you provide incentives for them to do so. Set your preorder price low and you’ll give people a great reason to get on board!

#4 — Build Your Social Media Following Early   Promoting your book on social media is essential, but if you want to ensure that you maximize your preorder sales, you need to build a strong following. Don’t wait until you make your book available to start getting followers and fans!

#5 — Reach Out to Online Influencers   Identify podcasters, bloggers YouTubers and social media mavens who can help you build excitement about preordering your book. Provide them with something of value in exchange for preorder promotion.

#6 — Use Goodreads   Obviously, you’re going to be promoting your upcoming release on your website (you’re doing that, right?), but be sure to use the Goodreads platform, as well, so you can reach the world’s biggest book fans where they hang out.

#7 — Run Promotions on Existing Books   If you have a back catalog of titles, now is a great time to promote them aggressively, which will enhance your author profile and get more people interested in your existing output. By doing this, you stand a much better chance of getting them to preorder your next one.

#8 — Update Existing Books’ Back Matter   Another great way to leverage your existing selection of books is to update their back matter to include the preorder link for your next book.

#9 — Build Your Marketing Plan as Early as Possible!   Don’t make your book available for preorder and then create your marketing plan; instead, create a solid marketing plan (which will involve you doing something significant to promote your book every week, at minimum) and then make your book available for preorder. Have a great week, authors!

Culled from: Book Marketing Tools