Merisa Lewis, Author at Lewis Marketing

7 Steps to Increase Your Instagram Engagement

Merisa Lewis — Tue, 11 May 2021 22:25:28 +0000

There’s no question that social media has become one of the most powerful tools in a business’s marketing arsenal. These media platforms are teeming with content-hungry users looking for news, entertainment, and the latest products and services to get their hands on. And while Facebook might be King of social media, Instagram has taken the scene by storm since its inception in 2010. Today, the photo-sharing platform hosts more than one billion users worldwide and has been proven to generate four times as many interactions as Facebook.

These interactions, or engagement, are the true drivers of your Instagram success; having a big audience is pointless if they’re not interacting or connecting with your content. This is because the Instagram algorithm uses each account’s engagement rate to boost its visibility and recommend it to other users. If you’re not getting much engagement, your account will eventually be drowned out by others who are.

So, let’s take a look at how you can increase your online engagement and best leverage your Instagram account to achieve your brand goals, whether business or personal.

What Counts As Engagement?

In order to increase your Instagram engagement, you first need to know what metrics you’ll want to play at. These metrics basically measure your audience’s interactions with the content you share, and are the things you’ll want to focus on in order to increase your engagement.

On Instagram, the following metrics are all constituents of your overall engagement rate: –

- Likes
- Comments
- Saves
- Shares
- Mentions
- Direct Messages
- Brand-specific hashtags
- Click-throughs
- Followers

It might sound a bit vague; can you really influence your audience to save or share your content to their personal platforms? The answer is yes, and luckily, we’re about to tell you exactly how to do it!

1. Define Your Brand

First and foremost, you need to have a distinct brand persona that is true to your personality as a business or individual. How do you want your audience to perceive you? What look, style, tone, and voice do you want to have?

It is essential that this persona is consistently reflected across all your content. Audiences find it easier and more enjoyable to relate to a brand that has a set of characteristics because it makes them feel more connected to it.

For example, Nike is cool, athletic, motivational, exciting…

What do you want to be?

2. Define Your Target Audience

Okay, so now your audience knows who you are. But, do you know who they are?

You have to know exactly who you’re targeting. How old is your audience? Where do they live? How much do they earn and spend? What are their interests? What kind of content do they consume on Instagram?

The more information you can gather about your audience, the more you can cater to their needs through carefully-curated content.

While you can roll up your sleeves and do the grunt work of researching all these questions, Instagram has made things easier for businesses by providing a Follower Breakdown. This gives you several audience insights such as Top Locations, Age Range, Gender, and Most Active Times.

3. Keep an Aesthetic Account

Yes, we all know beauty is subjective. But, there are just certain things on which there’s a general consensus.

You want your audience to have a pleasant experience while scrolling through your page. That won’t be the case if your posts are full of mismatching colors, random layouts, and erratic text.

Try applying and maintaining a theme to all your posts. For example, you can decide on a specific color palette for your posts, or have a sequence where you alternate between different types of content (text, photo, video, etc.). If you prefer uploading posts with white margins, then stick to that; having different layouts throughout your page can make it look messy.

For more inspiration on how to make your page aesthetically-pleasing, check out this article by Hootsuite!

4. Diversify Your Content

While looks are important, they certainly aren’t everything. You can have the prettiest Instagram feed, but if your content isn’t relevant or interesting in the eyes of your audience, you won’t get anywhere.

Diversifying your content is the best way to ensure that you’re catering to your audience’s different tastes while keeping it fun and exciting. You can post different types of content such as photos, videos, or informative text, and you can display this content in different forms; photos, IGTV videos, carousel posts, stories, live videos, etc. Instagram provides a bunch of options, so why limit yourself to just one?

The display form you use for your post can also affect the amount of engagement it garners. For example, carousels have been shown to get more engagement than single-photo posts.

Stories allow you to use stickers and polls to get your audience interacting with your content, which all adds up to your engagement rate.

Similarly, try posting content that you believe your followers would want to share on their pages or save to look at later. Remember, shares and saves are both counted as engagement metrics!

5. Incorporate CTAs in Your Posts

Incorporating calls to action in your posts, such as clicking on a link in your bio, tagging a friend in the comments, or using a branded hashtag is an effective way to make your audience feel involved and connected with your brand and, in turn, boost your engagement rate.

A smart way to get people to take action on your post is by asking them a question or inviting them to discuss a topic.

For example, you can end a caption with something like “Can you relate?” or “Have you tried this before?”. You can be as creative as you want with the questions, but always make sure they’re relevant!

6. Be Transparent

If you really want to reach people, brand transparency and authenticity cannot be emphasized enough.

Your audience doesn’t want to see a fake, made-up version of your brand. They want to see it like it is; the good and the bad.

You can encourage transparency in your brand by giving your audience a look into what happens behind the scenes. What kind of processes take place in order to produce your final content? Does your business have employees? Let them share their stories.

People don’t relate to perfection. You have to be you.

7. Post Consistently

Finally, you need to be able to keep your followers hooked!

You know what they say, right? Out of sight, out of mind. You want your audience to see your content on a daily basis and have it become a part of their Instagram experience. On the other hand, you also want to avoid bombarding them with multiple posts on any given day.

A good rule of thumb is to post 1-2 times a day. Obviously, things don’t always go as planned, and you might find that you’ve missed a post or two. That’s fine! Just try not to go more than two days without posting any new content.

Growing your Instagram business and increasing engagement is not an easy task. However, it’s a learning experience, and you can rest assured that you’ll get better at it with practice.

Use the tips above to get yourself started on the right track, and if you do it well, you’ll be seeing those engagement metrics going up in no time!

The post 7 Steps to Increase Your Instagram Engagement appeared first on Lewis Marketing.

Social Media for Small Business

Merisa Lewis — Fri, 30 Apr 2021 22:24:59 +0000

Introduction

Social Media may not be the first thing on your mind if you wear multiple hats in your company. Business operations that keep the lights on are always the number one priority—leaving little to no time for social media marketing.

Studies have shown that social media users regularly interact with companies via social media. If a customer can’t get through to tech support, they’ll voice their opinion online.

Social media gets a faster response than waiting in a phone queue for the next available representative when you are frustrated with a company.

You could kill two birds with one stone if you created a couple of social media platforms. This article will provide several suggestions on how to leverage social media for your small business.

1. Find Your People

2. Identify your Customer Journey

For most companies, the ideal customer journey is to reach the intended goal of sales, leads, or driving engagement in one or two steps. Unfortunately, most companies’ customer base is more complex.

Studies have shown that 92 percent of consumers abandon a company’s website without purchasing on their initial visit. Although this seems problematic, this valuable data can be insightful for identifying your customer’s behaviors.

The ideal customer you created for your online persona can now help you build out a Customer Journey. You know this person’s likes and dislikes, which means your website should be able to keep their attention and reach the desired goal.

Suppose you don’t see the results you wanted. In that case, reporting platforms like google analytics can help define the steps in the funnel that your customer goes through.

3. Track Your People

Having difficulty getting the results you want, likely, you don’t have enough data. Tracking and measuring the effectiveness of your social media content is critical to building brand equity.

Without data, you’re just throwing things out, hoping that something will stick. Google Analytics is a free tool that can track every page on your website. It also allows you to create custom metrics for each social media campaign you run.

Once you create a Google Analytics account, Google provides you with step-by-step instructions on adding tracking code to your website.

This information provides insight into how successful a sales promotion is going or if your readership has increased for a particular blog post.

The more you can track and measure, the more you know about who is interacting with your brand. Tracking also gives an insight into which areas of your business are working well and which areas need improvement.

Over time this information can be used if you want to leverage your brand for B2B marketing.

4. Plan Ahead

Now that you have the hard stuff out of the way, it’s time to create content. I’m also glad you’re still reading; this shows your serious about getting this social media thing right for your business.

Creating content may seem like a tall task if you don’t have a creative background, or so you may think. Making your post look pretty is just half the battle. As an industry expert, you have a plethora of knowledge to offer your followers.

Your online persona is an extension of your brand; you want the content to match that. If your company’s ideal customer is a millennial in health and wellness, your content should show that.

The rule of thumb before you start posting on social media is to have a plan.

Create a social media calendar that is two weeks ahead. If you wear multiple hats in your organization, set aside a couple of hours one day of the week to come up with your content. Once you’ve knocked out the schedule, you can go back today to day operational tasks.

Everyone involved with the social media portion of the business must know what’s on the content calendar.

There will be times when social media will take the back seat to more pressing issues, and that’s okay. The goal is to implement a system that will make your job easier and still build your digital presence.

5. Optimize

material will be a hit, and that’s fine. The goal is to optimize through testing your campaign strategies to see what works for your business.

Set a timeframe that you want to test your campaign strategy, then compare and contrast the results to see which posts are performing the best.

If you decide to run paid ads, you can set up the A/B Test. Which will give you insight on which one of your ads or sponsored posts performed the best?

Pro Tip:

Create 2 Ads sets for your A/B Test, run the campaign for a month and see which ad does the best.
Replace the underperforming ad with one from the second set of ads and rerun the campaign.
Once you have the result from that campaign, replace the underperforming ad with the last image and rerun the campaign for one more month.

Conclusion

As a small business, social media is not at the top of the priority list. That doesn’t mean it can’t be an extension of your brand that increases your awareness in the marketplace.

Social media shouldn’t be something that you need to stress over; it can be one of the areas of your personable business.

Digital Marketing will continue to grow, and your business doesn’t want to be last to the party. So, find your people, identify your customer journey, track your people, plan, and optimize.

At this point, you have nothing to lose by creating a couple of social media accounts for your business. If social media still isn’t for you consider hiring a professional within your budget to manage your pages.

Lewis Marketing offers an array of social media package for companies of all sizes.

The post Social Media for Small Business appeared first on Lewis Marketing.

Blue Ocean? What is That?

Merisa Lewis — Wed, 30 Dec 2020 19:57:17 +0000

Introduction

My first encounter with the Blue Ocean Strategy concept came while sitting in a grad school strategy class. My professor asked the question, “blue ocean or red ocean”? With a puzzled look on my face, I wondered what she was talking about. She later explained the framework, which would change my approach as a marketer moving forward.

If you were as puzzled as I was, consider yourself lucky because this is Blue Ocean Strategy 101. In this article, I will explain what a blue ocean strategy is? How to adopt a blue ocean to your business model.

What is a Blue Ocean Strategy?

The concept became mainstream in 2005 after professors W.Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne wrote a book titled Blue Ocean Strategy How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant”. Blue Ocean Strategy is described as the ideology of pursuing differentiation and low cost to open up a new market space and create new demand.

Done correctly your business is supposed to be more profitable. Companies using this approach are proactive in planning for the future practices of their industry. Think about your current marketing strategy; are you proactive or reactive?

Red Ocean

The high level of competition in the marketplace turns the “ocean” bloody hence the term “red ocean.” Businesses have to choose between value or cost because both cannot operate in this structure.

Most companies operate with a “Red Ocean” strategy because it’s easier to mimic the competition. Red Ocean is a reactive approach and emphasizes beating the competition. The phrase “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” describes companies using this approach.

Most industries are Red Oceans because they offer similar products and services. Food example, fast-food restaurants at their core all have similar business models. Quick serve food at a reasonable price. They even emulate similar discounts like the “buy one get one free, or a $4 meal deal”.

Blue Ocean Vs. Red Ocean

When comparing the two, the best way to differentiate the terms is by thinking about the driving factor for operations. The red ocean represents something that already exists in a given marketplace. In contrast, a blue ocean has not been created or seen in a particular industry.

Disney has perfected its blue ocean strategy throughout the years. First with the addition of resorts and product line extension of their theme parks, to the wristband Technology used to reserve particular services in the theme park

Both strategies want to maximize profit, but the level of competition differ. Any successful business should strive to limit the amount of competition in their segment of the market. Inherently thinking this manner will allow you to become an industry leader and operate within a blue ocean.

Adopting a Blue Ocean to Your Business Model

Now that you understand what Blue Ocean Strategy is, you are probably thinking, “how do I implement this to my business”?

Following the 5-step layout in Blue Ocean Shift, you can begin to shift from red to blue. Using the 5-step layout, we can look at the ride-sharing industry. Uber was able to gain market dominance in the ride-sharing industry because they eliminated the monopoly that was private taxi services. Offered a cost-efficient way for persons to travel around town.

When thinking about your blue ocean shift, you should experience the industry you are currently operating. Doing a simple SWOT analysis exposes threats and opportunities for growth in the industry. You may now take those opportunities and threats and formulate tactics that will change a shift.

Uber saw an opportunity in the taxi industry because people had few alternatives. This aligned with the blue ocean strategy because they could leverage differentiation and low cost to create their segment.

Taking an objective look at your current marketing and overall business strategy may be difficult but in order to grow, it’s necessary. You can’t fix what under the hood if don’t open the hood and take a look

Conclusion

Blue Ocean Strategy is a shift in thinking. Competition is irrelevant because you are competing with yourself. This will allow you to be proactive rather than reactive. Constant innovation is the only way to ensure your blue ocean is sustainable. If you need help identifying your Blue Ocean Strategy contact us today.

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